Raspberry Soap

So the Raspberry soap was pretty uneventful. I went back to using my regular soap calculator since the site was no longer down instead of the brambleberry calculator. I think the problem may have been too little lye and too much fragrance with the buttercream recipe. Brambleberry’s fragrance calculator asks the ounces of your soap rather than the oil and I guess everything is factored by the oil since the lye has to react with the oil. I came to this conclusion when I saw the difference in lye and fragrance for the soapcalc recipe.

Anyway, the raspberry soap smelled really nice and I actually used some red and blue in the soap. This soap and the christmas tree soap will be the only ones that I put fragrance in.

Okay so the soap did stick to the wax paper and kind of bled through the paper and glue itself to the mold. Making this morning a battle to get the soap out of the mold. Obviously, being the behemoth that I am I wrestled that soap and won.

Also, I chopped up the buttercream soap and it looks like monkey bread and smells really good.

So I’m pretty darn proud of myself for a few reasons. First of all I’ve managed to not burn the lye and milk mixture in all but the lemon soap (because it was made with water). All my milk soaps are a nice cream color unless of course I mixed in something that would make them darker. I’m pleased as punch. The other reason I’m feeling pretty amazed with myself is I’ve made about 80 bars of approx 5 oz soap already and I still have two more soaps to make.

Done tooting my own horn. Today’s soap is going to be Christmas tree with green dye and a hint of peppermint oil.

Pumpkins, lemons, and coffee

Okay so here’s the update on the pumpkin soap. It’s finally starting to harden. The top is drying out but the bottom is still mush so I flipped it over to get the bottom dry. On the upside it smells like pumpkin pie filling. mmMMmmm

(I know it’s super ugly)

Okay so after I dealt with the pumpkin soap I decided I’d go out and get some lemons and some cookie supplies to make a care package for some of my coworkers who are at a intensive training school. So I walk outside and I look at my window and I think wow that is some weird water spots on my driver’s side window. I get closer and I realize there is a small hole near the rear side mirror. Those aren’t water spots!!!! My window is riddled with tiny cracks. And I literally just stand there looking around thinking well someone will come up and tell me what happened. This makes no sense so of course someone will come explain what’s going on.

Nope, no one around. It’s completely quiet. That’s when it dawns on me to take pictures and call my insurance company. I immediately start crying while talking to the lady from Geico. Her being so nice and me being so confused as to why anyone would do this to my car was a little too much for me. Then I start thinking about all the classes I signed up for and things I have planned and how not having a working vehicle is going to hinder that stuff. Not to mention if I have to call back the place I asked for the last year to take me for an internship and tell them sorry can’t start this Friday like I planned. Ugh! So I call my family and friends and whine and wander around.

So two very lucky things happened later that day: I walked down to the shoppette that’s a couple blocks from my house and they had lemons! And I managed to find a glass repair place that comes to me and had an appointment available for the very next day. (So my car is already fixed! Yipee!) So after making the police report (my mom made me) and cracking jokes with him about how if the kids didn’t write their names on the rock there’s no way to find them, I went to make soap.

So I got to make lemon soap even though a wrench was thrown in my plans!

Okay so here’s how the lemon soap making went. I decided to swap out the lemon juice for a few ounces of water. Also, I decided to make this soap with lemons and water instead of milk because I want it to me cleansing rather than moisturizing. Then I shredded the lemon rind and added that after trace. After that I poured it all into the mold and tried to sniff it but I didn’t smell anything. 😦

So this morning I pulled the lemon soap out of the mold and started chopping it up. The rind turned a really pretty orange color and the soap is a light yellow color. It smells like lemon muffins and the bit of rind I squished in my fingers smelled super lemony. I’m hoping the longer it cures the stronger the lemon scent will be or hopefully when you shower with it and the lemon oil in the rind gets rubbed it’ll release a really strong lemon scent. Anyway, I can’t wait to test out this soap.

So today’s soap that I decided to make is going to be called Wake me up before you go go. It’s made of butterscotch coffee grinds and dark chocolate fragrance. I decided to keep with the chocolate and coffee theme and make it using milk. So far it smells super coffee like with a faint chocolate smell. I think this one is going to be pretty potent since most of the soaps I can’t smell until I’ve cut them.

So weird note about making soap. Having to clean up everything everyday and clean out the soap is making the skin on my palms peel. good thing I’m starting that internship and won’t be able to make soap as often.

Oh! And I decided I’m making a soap out of beer or Sailor Jerry Spiced Rum.

Pumpkin soap

Okay so yesterday I noticed that the bacon soap had gotten hard much quicker than I thought it would so I took it out of the mold early. I kept checking it and poking it while it was setting and I couldn’t smell a thing. I was pretty worried my soap wouldn’t smell. Well as I was cutting it you could smell it!! It smells strongly of soup, kind of like chicken soup and you can see visible pieces of bacon. I stowed it away to cure in a plastic container.

Then I started to make the pumpkin soap. When I got to the point to add my additives to the soap I noticed that after I added the pumpkin the soap became extremely watery. I was a little worried but I figured it wasn’t a huge deal. So I put it in the mold and left it alone. So like the bacon soap I went back to the kitchen a few hours later and poked it to see whether it was hardening. I broke the skin on the soap and all this oil rose to the top. I was like oh crackers! What do I do now. I figured not touching it was probably the best idea. So I left it alone.

Well I came back downstairs this morning and found it had gotten harder but it was still pretty dang mushy and the top still had a layer of oil on it. So I absorbed all the excess oil with paper towels and left it to harden for a while longer.

I came back and nope still mush. So I poked it and it felt like it got harder farther down. So now, hoping that maybe just the top 1/2 inch was mush I opened the mold. Nope, mostly mush except the bottom inch which was hard. So I decided I’d mix the whole thing together and remold it and then let it sit for longer so it has more time to harden.

So I took it out of the wooden mold and made my own mold out of a pan and aluminum foil. It seemed like it as already becoming thicker and less moist. So I left it to dry on  shelf. I’ll check back on it in a day or two. Other than that it smelled of pumpkin and spices but mildly. So I liked it a lot. I think once this soap finally sets it’s going to be a really really good soap. Also, when I went to wash the gunk off my hands from mixing it back together there were bubbles everywhere and it’s supposed to take a month for a soap to be super bubbly. So that makes me pretty happy. this soap will have a really good lather to it.

Okay so my lesson from this is that the pumpkin had too much water content to be an additive. I should stick with either concentrated additives that require little amounts to make a big difference (like fragrances) or dry products. For things like pumpkin and the lemon soap I’m going to make today I’m going to substitute some of the water/milk out for the pumpkin/lemon. That way it’s added without mucking up the chemistry. So the lemon juice is going to be substituted for the water in the next recipe and I’ll add shredded lemon rind as the additive to make it smell wonderful.