Bramble Berry was sweet to ask if I would be interested in participating in their month of Givember which will include weekly tutorials and free gifts with purchases as a way of saying “thank you” to their customer during the month of November.  They sent a little package with some goodies including the silicone sphere mold, cranberry chutney fragrance oil and fuchsia lab color!  I immediately tried the sphere mold and loved it so I’ve already bought another one.  It makes perfectly adorable round soap balls.  So I’m going to show you how to work with the sphere mold and make adorable felted sphere soaps.

This is gonna be a long one!  But stay with me because at the end I’m going to give you an exciting coupon code to use during Bramble Berry’s Givember event.

This recipe fits nicely into two of the round sphere molds.

Apricot kernel oil – 2 oz
Avocado oil – 2 oz
Coconut oil – 8 oz
Olive oil – 9 oz
Shea butter – 1 oz

Lye – 3.17 oz
Water – 4 oz

Cranberry Chutney FO – 1.2 oz
Fuchsia LabColor (diluted) – 15 drops

If you are new to soapmaking…visit my basic tutorial first as it goes into more details on the basics.

Let’s make soap!

Make your lye solution.

Weigh out and melt the coconut oil and shea butter.  Add the liquid oils to the melted oils.

Add the fragrance oil and fuchsia color to the melted oils.

Get everything ready to go.  You should have your melted oil (with fragrance and color), the lye solution and two sphere molds.

Be sure you have on your safety gear!

Add the lye solution to the melted oils.

Check out that beautiful color!  When you reach a light trace…pour into the molds.

Let them sit overnight and unmold.  I wanted mine to gel so I put them onto a heating pad and covered with a towel until they gelled.

Unmold!

They can require a bit of cleanup.  Simply take a knife and cut off the nub.  You can then smooth it down with your finger.

Adorable!  And even more adorable felted!  So let’s make some cute felted soap balls!

Let your soap balls cure at least three weeks before you felt them.  You will need some wool roving.  Make sure its the kind that shrinks down and felts.  Look around locally and see what you can find.

Pull the wool into thin pieces as shown below if you want to create a striped pattern.  If you don’t…just use single colors similar in size as shown below.

Wrap your ball as evenly and tautly as you can.

Dunk your soap into hot water.

Bring it out after it is completely wet.  Then start squeezing and patting.  You don’t want to rub at this point or it will move your fibers around too much.  Dunk again.  Squeeze and pat some more.  It should start felting.

Now you can rub.  Alternate between squeezing, patting and rubbing your soap to felt.  You don’t want to dunk it into water too much but do it a few more times.  You can also use bubble wrap or a woven dinner mat to help with the agitation and felting.

Once you feel like you have it felted enough…where you pull on the fibers and they don’t pull up…then shock it with cold water.  This is a tip I learned from Bobbie at the Texas Soapmakers Conference.  Cold water shocks wool and causes it to felt as well.  So give it a good shock in ice cold water.

Then roll it in a towel to squeeze out the water.

And there you have it!  Adorable felted soap balls!

Cute!  And this one above came out with a little face on him.  So why felted soap?  Felted soap is a wash cloth or luffa and soap in one!  The felt causes the soap to lather like crazy and gives your skin a gentle exfoliation.  Wool dries quickly between uses and is anti-microbial so it doesn’t grow yuckies!

Are you still with me?

Remember up above when I mentioned being a part of Bramble Berry’s Givember promotion?

Enter the code GIVEMBER200 on any order when you check out at brambleberry.com to be entered into a drawing to win a $200 gift card from Bramble Berry.  This code is good on orders placed during the month of November only.  Thanks, Bramble Berry!

-Happy Soaping!

Amanda Griffin