Monday, Monday so(ap) good to me.....

Another Monday rolled around and there were decisions to be made, would we make soap or just stay put and do "house stuff.  Neither of us wanted to do the "house stuff" but laundry was piling up, clean clothes needed to be folded, dishes washed, floors......ah well, you get our drift.  

So we stayed in our respective homes and did the deed, surely a clean house would be worth something, a pure heart maybe?  No soap today, that was the plan, however I couldn't just walk by all the soap making materials and not look, plan and scheme.
Eventually around 4:30 I bit the bullet and decided to make a batch.

My visiting daughter T advised that a simple, pure scent was better, don't over think I was told, so after sticking several bottles of essential oils under our noses we decided a red grapefruit essential oil would be nice.  I wanted to add a drop or two of a floral scent to go with the grapefruit so against T's advice I added a tiny, tiny bit of Jasmine.

The colors I chose were white, pale orange and yellow, all colors that remind me of the pink grapefruit that grew in my front yard where  I grew up in FL.  

I chose to use the Old Faithful recipe - a combination of castor, palm, coconut and olive oil.  Since I was alone I decided to do the spoon swirl again as it's easy to do and the results are quite pretty.   One thing I didn't count on was how hard it is to pour soap and take pictures at the same time!  Here are a few shots of the layering process, I rotated colors, white, pale peach, and yellow then did it again and again until the mold was full.

There is actually no rhyme or reason to how the soap goes in as long as you rotate the colors.

white, pale orange yellow, white, pale orange yellow

almost to the top of the mold

The mold is full, so now soap goes into the insulation box to cure for 24 hours.  We cover the box with a couple of towels to keep it very warm and help speed the curing process along.

On Tuesday afternoon the soap seemed ready, it had gotten really hard, so I began the process of un-molding and cutting the soap.

The finished soap is shown below, this batch made 15 bars, plus a few extra slivers that can be used as samples.  

                                                                        

last picture, a close up of the spoon swirl grapefruit - jasmine soap