New Soap Mold Designs

Mold Market has introduced eight new soap mold designs for spring 2014. GoPlanetEarth will carry them all. We expect to have them in stock by the end of April. An ADD TO CART button will appear next to the mold once we have them in stock.



 

From t-shirts to cupcakes, moustache products are the new rage. This moustache mold is fun and can be embellished in a variety of ways. Each mold sheet produces 4 soaps that measure 4-inches in width x 3/4 inches deep x 1.72" in length.

What big or little boy doesn't have an affection for tractors? I live in a small farming community where tractor races are a form of entertainment. I can't wait to see what Sophie Soap Chick does with this mold design. The multi-layer depths are ideal for using assorted colors when using our soap injector tool. Each mold sheet produces three soaps.

UPC Codes for Mold Market Molds

Mold Market has notified us that they will be displaying UPC codes on their molds starting January 2014. This is great news for anyone selling their molds in a retail store setting. Mold Market offers over 250 plus quality plastic molds for soap making and chocolates.

If you own a retail store or online company and have an interest in Mold Market's reseller program, please complete the following application.

A complete catalog of molds available from Mold Market can be viewed here.

Don't Let 'Sameness' Validate You

 “I don’t want that one, NeeNee, it’s different.” Those were the words spoken by my seven year old granddaughter, Olivia, as I handed her a handful of fresh cherries.

“What’s wrong with it”, I asked?

“It doesn’t look like the rest of the cherries; it’s not the same color.” Without hesitation, she exchanged the cherry for one that resembled all the others. “There”, she said, “now they all look alike”.

It was an innocent, yet thought provoking, statement that triggered a red flag. Might she be swayed to take the road less traveled in life because it is wasn’t a popular choice? I wondered if she viewed sameness as a validation of acceptance within her peer group.

I tend to be OCD, so maybe I overplayed the whole cherry conversation; but one thing is certain, following the masses to “fit in” has never been an option for me. I like the idea of traveling the road less traveled. There is excitement in bushwhacking my own path in life and living with a fearless desire to see what lies ahead. Of course, blazing new trails doesn’t come without opposition or obstacles.

There are things to consider before taking the road less traveled.

1.       The road less traveled is narrow and often lonely. You won’t earn popularity votes.

2.       You will encounter plenty of people who didn’t follow their dreams, or gave up; I call them dead soldiers. Avoid their discouragement and stay focused on the road you’ve taken.

3.       Don’t expect everyone to understand your choices.

4.       Failure is not the end. Those on the popular track are waiting for some miracle to land in their lap. Guess what? Miracles don’t happen without hard work.

5.       Set your own challenges. Become the CEO of your own life and set goals different from others.

6.       Success isn’t measured by time; it’s measured by experiences and opportunities that allow you to know what works best for you.

7.       Understand that trailblazers disrupt nature; they overturn rocks, cut down trees and move dirt. If they can’t remove the obstacle they build bridges over or around it. Sheer determination cuts through barriers and obstacles.  

8.       Taking the road less traveled is for leaders; they point the way, take the risks, and have a vision for turning their dreams into reality.

9.       Know your passion and gifts. You need to know with absolute certainty that the path you’re blazing is the right one for you.

10.   Trailblazers create a path where none existed before.

 

As an online entrepreneur and manufacturer for over 15 years, I’ve learned valuable lessons from the school of hard knocks, both personally and professionally. One thing is certain; an individual deemed an odd-colored cherry, regardless of age, has two choices. They can let sameness validate them or embrace their uniqueness and take the road less traveled.  I want my granddaughter to understand she doesn’t have to be like all the other cherries in the (peer) pack; or, stifled by other people’s expectations and limiting thoughts.

When the time comes for Olivia to venture out on her own, NeeNee will be there with a shovel, ax, hammer and backhoe. She can count on me to mentor, saw trees, chop thorny bushes and build bridges as she blazes her trail in life. And may she find a bowl of odd-colored cherries at the end of her trail; a reminder she took the road less taken.

 

How to Clean Our Soap Injector Tool

If you want to make intricate, detailed soaps, there is one tool you can't be without. It's the Soap Injector. I recommend having several on hand when pouring multiple colors. I posted about this tool here, but wanted to post an update on how to clean the tool after use. This short video clip will show you how.

Here are a few examples of what you can create using the soap injector tool.

 

Mold Market Music Notes Mold

 

Mold Market Polka Dot Mold

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see, the possibilities are endless once you master this soaping tool.

Melt & Pour Soap Making: Sweet Treat Soaps

These sweet little cookie soaps look good enough to eat (and easy to make). You will need white melt and pour soap base for the cookie and drizzled area. The chocolate is clear soap colored with chocolate brown. Mold Market's cookie mold was used.

This short video clip shows how to use the soap injector tool to drizzle on the raspberry colored soap. If using multiple colors the injector tool will need to be cleaned before using the next color.

Keep a bowl filled with hot water at your workstation. Empty the syringe tube of any leftover soap. Then place the tip of the injector into the hot water and pull back on the syringe. Press down on the plunger to release the hot water. Continue this process until the the injector tool is free of soap.

It's handy to have several injector tools on hand when using several colors of soap. When you're done with one color, empty the injector of any soap and just drop in the bowl of hot water to soak and grab a clean injector. It's a time saver.

You can clean all the injectors once your project is complete.






Soap Injector Tool

You can purchase the soap injector from GoPlanetEarth. It is sold as a single unit or in packs of 10 or 50 count.

Mold Market Introduces 9 New Soap Mold Designs

Mold Market has released 9 new soap mold designs that are sure to please the heart of many soapers. They range in style from classic, to kids, to just plain fun (as in their s'more mold!). They include a pebble rock mold (pictured above) and a plum leaf (shown below).

As always, Mold Market pushes it to the cutting edge in mold designs and the grape fern with border (shown below) is a perfect example. In a future blog post, I will have to talk about what it takes to create one these mold designs. It's not as easy and straight-forward as you may believe it to be.

You can check out the 9 mold designs here. Other new designs include a S'more mold (based on pre-orders, an expected sell out). There is Homer the Fish, Whale Willie, Assorted Easter Eggs, Oblong Leaf, and a Tic Tac Toe mold.

Mold Market is one of the leading soap mold companies in the US. They are a strong supporter and sponsor of the Handcrafted Soap Makers Guild year after year. Quality follows their name. You won't be disappointed with their mold line AND all molds are made in the USA!! I know ya' all are jumping up and down about silicone molds these days. But, 99% of silicone molds from are NOT made in the USA. They are manufactured in Mexico, China, or other countries that are not supporting the US economy and our workers. Go ahead and shoot me now (I know I'm going to get email feedback on that one), but I have to call it like it is.

Hello Monday! Eight new Mold Market mold designs have been finalized & should be available to us mid November. Here's a sneak peek at one of the molds. We'll have all 8 new designs posted for preview once Mold Market releases them for publication.

GoPlanetEarth.com is a major distributor for the Mold Market Mold line and stocks over 250 of the Mold Market molds. This Tic Toe soap mold will easily accept multiple color pours using our Injector Tool.

Soap Dishes: Display Your Handmade Soaps in Style

I had a chat with a couple of neighbor friends about an upcoming charity event. In the process of that conversation, they shared these beautiful handmade garden art shaped from "real" leaves casted in concrete. Of course, my soaping mind went haywire thinking of all the neat things you could do with this concept... like making handcrafted soap dishes to go with your handcrafted soap!

I meet with my friends next Tuesday and they are going to show me how to make these incredible handcrafted items. I am going to make a few that are a smaller soap dish size as well as other larger trays. What a great way to display your handcrafted soaps for the holiday season. I'm lovin' it!

I'll be sharing the "how-to". So make sure you stay posted.

Soap Molds: What's Not to Love About These Designs?

OK, these are definitely two designs that will be on my favored list. Think of the color possibilites! Black, white & red, holiday green & red, earthtone colors, golds, silvers and bronze colors.... OMG... these are awesome molds.

We used the injector tool found in our Professional Soap Kit to fill in the mosaic squares and heart dots.

The only problem encountered when making these soaps: we were testing a new soap base and used it on a couple of the soaps. This new soap base was very, very hard and was not suitable to multiple color pours (bummer!). It set up way to fast and became brittle causing some of the dots and mosaic squares to fall off when the soap was released. Our chemist is working to reformulate the base; for now, it's not a base we will be stocking. However, when we used all of our current soap bases, they worked like a charm and all the heart dots stayed in place as did the mosaic squares.

You'll want to be sure to let the heart soaps fully set-up. Otherwise, you could lose a dot or two when releasing the soap from the mold. Also, it is best if you inject the colored dots, let them set up until nearly firm and immediately pour the base color. DO NOT pour the base color at too high of a temp or you will melt your little dots!

This is definitely an easy project for anyone new to muliple color pours.

Melt & Pour Tutorial: How to Frost A Cupcake Soap

GoPlanet now offers two different decorator kits for soap frosting. The Decorator Plus is our most recent addition. It is made of plastic and contains 5 decorating tips. The clear plastic allows you to see just how much soap frosting you have left in the tube.

The Decorator Pro kit is made of stainless steel and is very durable and comes with six different tips. I've been using this particular kit for many years with great success. Below is a short tutorial on how to use the "Star" tip to create a nicely frosted cupcake soap. We suggest using the Mold Market Original Cupcake base. Place a paper cupcake liner in the mold before pouring the soap if you want the look of a "real" cupcake.

STEP ONE:

Hold Open Star Decorating Tip 1M approximately 1/4" above cupcake top at a 90° angle to cupcake surface. Pipe a spiral of icing, beginning at the outer edge and working inward.

STEP TWO:

Stop pressure; pull tip away.

STEP THREE:

Pipe a second spiral, smaller (not as wide) on top. End spiral at center. Stop pressure; pull tip straight up and away.

Basic SoapMaking Instructional DVD

This instructional DVD gets a "10" on my scale. If you are a melt and pour soaper wanting to cross-over into cold-process soapmaking, you will want to have this informative tutorial in your soaping library.

Our soapmaking diva, Irene, shares detailed instructions, tips and secrets to create cold process soaps. Learn from one of the best soapmaker's in the industry. A featured speaker and demonstrator at the Annual Soap Guild conferences, Irene will help you breeze through the basics of making soap.

We're currently offering a limited introductory price of $19.95. That's $5.00 off the list price. If you visit our FaceBook page and "like" us, you'll find a coupon for an additional $1 off. TODAY ONLY.

Melt & Pour Soap Making: Frightfully Fun Sophie Soaps

Two new flexible silicone molds arrived this week and our girl Sophie was excited to give them a try. Here are the soaps results from her test drive of the new molds. For those of you not familiar with Sophie, she is our college employee who works for us during the summer. In the Fall she will be going back to school where she is studying criminal justice. In the meantime, she works for GoPlanet filling in as needed and helping to train our two newest employees.

Sophie used Black Liquid Gel color for the pumpkin eyes, nose and mouth, and also for the skull base. The pumpkins were poured in orange oxide in clear base (front), neon bright orange liquid gel in white base (back right) and tye dye orange flower child color (left front) in clear base.



The injector tool from the Professional Tool Kit was used to fill in the skull and pumpkin facial features. If you are new to soap making, these are great molds that easily introduce you to two color soap pours using the injector tool.

I hope to work on some nifty, creative soaps this weekend to share with you next week. It's all about finding the time. I think I might actually have this weekend free for soaping fun. Crossing my fingers that it happens because that's the part of my business I love the most... making fun soaps to share with you!

Soap Making: Ribbon Soap Mold Using the Injector Tool

Last week, I made a post on FaceBook about Sophie's cupcake soaps. Yesterday, Sophie experimented with Mold Market's Ribbon Soap mold. This was her first experience using the injector tool found in our Professional Soap Making Tool Kit. The injector allowed her to easily fill white areas with melted soap base.

The key to using the this tool is keeping the soap at a pourable temp and making sure that you have hot water to clean the tool should the tip become clogged. The soap base needs to flow evenly through the tip. If the soap starts to set up inside the injector tool, you could be in trouble. So you need to work quickly with the filled tube and use HOT water to clean the tube should it become clogged. If using more than one color, you may want to have a couple of these injector tools on hand.

Here is an example of how this tool was used for another Mold Market mold. The injector tool was used to fill each dot. It was a whiz and there were no overflow issues.

The above picture shows what can happen once you have filled in the small, detailed area using the injector tool. I warned Sophie that pouring the second soap layer too hot would result in the detailed areas bleeding into her second pour. She quickly learned this lesson. The white soap was poured at too high of a temp and and the red soap melted slightly and merged into the white area.

If you are new to soap making, using a thermometer will help gauge temperature. You can also do the "pinkie test". If you dip your pinkie finger into the soap and it is not a comfortable temp, then it's too hot to pour over that second color.

Visit our Facebook page today and "LIKE" the page. You will then be eligible to recieve the FREE injector tool being offered today. Our Facebook page will give you those details.

Soap Colorant Tips Now in Stock

We have received repeated requested to bring back the dropper tips for our colorant bottles. We discontinued these tips last year in lieu of raising colorant prices. We are now offering the tips as an option. They are sold in 12 count packages. You can order the tips here. They retail for $3.75 a package.

Why PDF is Best for Sharing Files

PDF stands for Portable Document Format, a file format that originated in print publishing as a tool for proofing print jobs before sending them to the printer. Today, it has become the standard for sharing print-ready documents via the Internet.

The format was developed by Adobe and was originally available only to owners of the company's Acrobat software. During the mid-90s, Adobe began distributing Acrobat Reader software, a free tool for viewing PDF files – making it a popular choice for authors, publishers, and designers who wanted to get around the formatting limitations of HTML. PDF is now accepted as an open standard, and is widely supported by other software vendors.

Several characteristics of PDF make it a great choice for sharing or publishing documents over the Internet.

• Ability to retain formatting. PDF allows the original presentation and formatting of any document to remain exactly as its original author intended it to look, including images, fonts, and layout. This is a distinct advantage over other formats such as Microsoft Office documents or HTML, which can change the document’s appearance according to the software and fonts installed on the computer used to view the document.
  Security. With PDF documents, you have full control over users' ability to open, print, copy, modify, or share documents. You can selectively enable or disable these actions for each document according to your preferences.
  


• Easy to create. Because PDF has become an open standard, many software vendors support the format. You don’t necessarily need Adobe's Acrobat software to create PDF documents. Many plug-ins for Microsoft Office, print drivers, or online conversion services are available free or for a fee and make it easy and convenient to publish or export to the format.
  


• Compressible. PDF file sizes can be shrunk to suit the needs of target users. PDF documents can be packaged and compressed while retaining the original quality, or can be down-sampled and compressed to dramatically reduce file size, making it quick to download over the web.
  


• Powerful and flexible. You can add interactive elements including form fields, hyperlinks, electronic signatures, and multimedia such as sounds and videos to your PDF documents. Although these features are also available with other formats, they are not as easy to package and share as PDF.
  

You may want to consider switching to PDF when you want to share or publish documents over the Internet. There are a number of free programs online that allow you to do this without the need of purchasing software. Loop PDF is one that I like and I have found it be one of the simplest PDF conversion tools out there. You have to create an account to use it, but after you do, the free tool lets you add PDFs from your computer or URLs, and combine them into a single document. You can also convert other file types into PDFs. Loop PDF easily converted files in just a few seconds for me.

Once you've converted your file, you can then download, save or publish. A quick, handy application for any growing business. Best of all, it's FREE.

Sizzling Designs...Melt & Pour Designer Soaps

Ooh-la-la! Now these are soaps that scream "Hey, look at me!!" These have been on my instructional "to-do" list for quite some time. I was like a kid in the candy store when I was finally able to make a few and was delighted with my first-time results.

The soaps are made with melt and pour soap base and our new GPE Printable Soap Paper. We currently sell the GPE Soap Paper for color laser printers only, but ink-jet GPE Soap Paper is arriving next week.

This soap project is easy, easy, easy, and my tutorial video (shown below) walks you through the process. Simply find your artwork and print it onto the GPE Soap Paper. The Laser GPE Paper runs $1.49 a sheet, but you can fit a good number of designs on each printable sheet. For this project I printed 8 different designs on one 8 1/2 x 11 sheet and made 8 soaps. There is a price break when purchasing 10 sheets. The printable ink-jet GPE paper is slightly higher than the laser.

The artwork stays on the soap after repeated use when using a color laser printer. If using an ink-jet printer, you will need to follow the instructions provided with the ink-jet GPE Soap Paper to ensure the artwork stays intact.

All of the supplies for this project can be purchased at GoPlanetEarth.com. Here's what you'll need:

• GPE Printable Soap Paper
• Melt & Pour Soap Base
• Soap Colors (I used our liquid gel colors)
• Soap Fragrance (I used Floral Bamboo Musk, Island Retreat... (very yummy!!), and French Tarragon Oswego (great uni-sex scent)
• Mold Market Soap Molds (basic shapes work best)

Other items you will need (that we don't sell) are a microwave, paper towels, microwaveable dishes, rubbing alcohol and a color printer. Look for templates to fit many of the basic Mold Market mold designs for use with the GPE Soap Paper. We should have those online within the next couple of weeks.

 

Make Realistic Melt & Pour Snail Soaps

This advanced melt and pour soap project produces realistic snail soaps using Mold Market's snail mold. The finished soaps are well worth the invested time. All of the materials needed to complete this soap project are available from GoPlanetEarth.com.

You will want to have our PJ Professional Soap Tool Kit on hand for this soaping project. It's an absolute necessity if you want to recreate the soaps shown.

Watch the tutorial below, or visit GoPlanetEarth.com for step-by-step printed instructions.

Classic & Timeless: Melt & Pour Cameo Soap from Bunny Bubbles

What a classic look and timeless design. This finished melt and pour soap was beautifully done by Terry at Bunny Bubbles and is part of the Mold Market Mold collection available from GoPlanetEarth. What a great display, Terry... good job. Learn how to create this duo-pour soap using PJ's Professional Mini Tool Kit.

Here is the newest addition to our mold line-up. Made in the USA from quality pine these wooden loaf molds have finished/sanded edges and feature quality craftmanship. For use with cold-process soap. Each mold sold is helping an unemployed craftsman in our area. Michigan's econony is one of the worst in the Nation. Most of these guys/gals are not able to draw unemployment and building these loaf boxes is helping to put food on the table or fill gas tanks. It's just one of the ways that GoPlanetEarth is giving back to our community.

The rectangular shaped box lifts off the base for easy release. Lid fastens with bolts. As with all wooden molds, you MUST line box with waxed freezer paper; but, we make it easy by pre-lining so it's ready for first-time use.

Once the mold is filled, cover the soap with plastic wrap and place the lid on top. When the soap is covered in this way, it will not need insulation while curing. Clean the mold by scraping with a putty knife or by wiping with a damp cloth. Do not soak in water.

Molds are offered in two, four and six pound sizes. For a complete list of interior dimensions visit GoPlanetEarth.com.

I'm Now a Tweeple

I'm an official Tweeple sending out Tweets in Twitter land. You can follow my twitter at www.twitter.com/TheSoapLady

So why Twitter. For me, it puts a human face on our company. It's like blogging but has a 140 character limit for each entry you make. The posts may not always have something important to say or of any real value. My tweet can be as simple as, "currently on flight to Washington," or "enjoying a cup of Starbuck's Java right now," or any random insight from my personal life. Tweets often seem trivial, but they also show me as a real person behind a corporate entity.

I want to directly connect with my customers and Twitter is a great way to do this. I invite you to follow The Soap Lady Twitter as I announce new products, sales, promotionals and share tweets that let you know I'm human, just like you. I hope you'll tweet back.