Soap Lily: Tuesday, April 8, 2014

The kids are back in school and we are on a roll, so we tackled another technique today. We are still so new, and honestly haven't started selling yet, so we aren't sure what everyone is going to like. Right now we are just trying things that look fun and interesting to see what we can do and what we may be good at.

Today K was going for another swirl pattern, but things just don't always go exactly as planned. The batter began to thicken sooner than we expected, so our vision of the final product changed just a bit. We used the same soap recipe as yesterday, but we still had the temperatures a little warmer than needed when we combined the oils and the lye water. Then we mixed a bit too long, we think. We plan to keep the batter to a much thinner trace next time and see if that makes a difference.

Supplies at the ready...

For today's scent, we used a mixture of Lemon Cake and Lavender & Herb oils. You should see us trying to decide what scent to use each time. We are certain that Chanel or other expensive perfumers must look much as we do waving our hands in the air to mix scents, then sniffing and snorting to clear our olfactory senses before waving and sniffing another one.

These are the colors we chose for today's soap. Aren't they great spring colors?

We started out by pouring in back and forth stripes and layering the different colors. By the time we got to the bottom of the batter bowls, the batter was going into a much thicker trace. Pouring was not going to be an option, so we moved on to the truly professional technique of "glopping."

We HATE the idea of wasting ANY of the soap batter. The stuff just costs too much to waste! So we use spatulas and scrape and scrape to get as much out as possible. When we had all of it in the mold, K attacked it again with the skewer. After making only one pass through it, A tackled her and burned the skewer so she couldn't swirl it any more. It looks so pretty! A thinks it looks like flowers on a vine.