Posted in Soap

Pale Orchid Soap

Purple Haze mica, Orchid Fragrance Oil, White French Clay.  I’m going for a pale lavender color and a delicate scent.

First, while my oils were melting and the lye solution was cooling, I blended my dry ingredients.

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I pre-mix my dry stuff with a bit of the oils so that they blend into the soap solution better without clumping.  This is the slurry.  Bright, huh?

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Once everything is mixed, I poured it into my mold.  I love this little mold.  I get 8 bars, roughly 3 oz each, from a 1 lb oil solution.  The lye solution is about 6 or 7 oz so total I have about 24 oz of soap mixture.

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Usually I unmold after 24 hours, but this time I waited 48, to see if that had any impact on how hard or soft the bars are.  It didn’t.  If I pressed hard, it would dent the soap, because they have to cure for about a month, give or take a week.  They will harden during that time as the moisture evaporates.  At this stage, they are still sticky, and if I did The Zap Test, (where you touch the tip of your tongue to the soap to test it) I would get zapped, because lye is still present.  Once the lye solution is fully saponified, The Zap Test won’t zap you and the soap is safe to use.  Testing homemade soap made with natural oils and essential oils isn’t nearly as gross as it may sound.  While I do sometimes use fragrance oils (or man-made scents) in some of my soaps, I use about half the recommended amount, as I prefer soaps that are not strongly scented.

Don’t try this with commercially made soaps!  LOL  *gagspitptooey*

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The close up glamour shot, ha!

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Posted in Soap

Blueberry Pancake Soap

I got some lovely peacock mica in the sample pigment package I got, and I thought it would go nicely with the Blueberry Pancake Fragrance Oil I have.  I added in some French White clay to make the soap more luxurious.

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As you can see, micas don’t work super well in cold process soaps, like they do in melt and pour clear soap base.  Mica has shimmers in it that work best in the transparent bases, but cold process soap is opaque and naturally ivory colored.  Oxides actually work better for coloring cold process soaps.  The sample package I got had bits of both micas and oxides so I thought I’d play.

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As you can see, the color lightened up considerably and has a slight blue-green tint to it, as a result of the natural ivory color.

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Still, it’s actually pretty close to what I was expecting, and I rather like the color.  Next time I use this color though, I think I’ll go with a more watery type of scent, like rain or ocean or something like that, and I plan on getting some more colors also, including some blues that might work better with Blueberry Pancake fragrance.

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Posted in Soap

Soapy Clean

I finally got through rendering all that tallow, on Saturday I think.  Boy what a task that was!  I got a lot of tallow – haven’t measured it yet, but somehow I don’t think it was as much as I could have gotten.  I’m still a novice at this and it’s a lot of trial and error.  At least this time it wasn’t nearly as smelly as the last time, whew!  That wet method sure did make a huge difference in that regard.

Now that the temps have nose-dived into the sub-zero range, I’m not too worried about the bones still in our little storage locker, so I’m making some soap.  As soon as the weather turns warmer, I’ll get back to making that bone broth.  Also not the most fragrant proposition.

This is from a batch of coconut oil soap I just made for my husband.  He likes that recipe the best – just straight coconut oil. I used a synthetic fragrance oil to scent these, as he’s not a huge fan of the essential oil scents that I have on hand.  So these smell like regular old Ivory bars, but as long as he likes it, I’m happy.

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I made a new recipe for shampoo bars, and those are setting up right now and will be unmolded tomorrow or the next day, and I also want to make another batch of tallow bars.  I can’t believe how much I love the tallow bars.  They make my skin feel so nice!

I’m debating about using coloring agents in my soap.  I’d like something a little jazzier than plain old ordinary beige, but at the same time, pigments aren’t cheap and they don’t really add anything, you know?  So, I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll try one of the recipes I have for using things like crushed spices or something – paprika is supposed to make a pretty bar.  We’ll see.

In other news, I was going through the kids’ closet today.  How in the world did my son end up with 6 blue and 5 red shirts?!  Time for some purging!

Cross posts on my daily blog.