Mother's Day has come and gone, so we both put away our "Queen for a Day" crowns and got back to work.
Even during the weekends we find ourselves thinking about "soap stuff"! Saturday "K" found some beautiful white English porcelain cups at a yard sale and decided to make candles in them. In the mean time "A" had forwarded an article about using tea cups for candles. Great minds think alike you know! On Saturday afternoon "K" decided to make the candles - solo!
She measured the wax and while it melted, she hot glued the wicks to the base of the cups and stretched blue painter's tape across the tops to keep the wicks in place. The scents "K" chose were Cannabis Rose from Natures Garden ( +Natures Garden ) and Wisteria and Lilac from Lebermuth ( +Lebermuth Co ). Choosing the colors was easy - a bright pink for the cannabis rose and lavender for the wisteria/lilac.
The candles turned out nicely and smell great!
Now we return to our normal work week....Monday
With our first official public selling venture this coming Saturday (Mountain Laurel Festival - Clarkesville, GA) we are trying to be organized. For us this may be problematic, but we are trying! Most of our time this week will be dedicated to pricing, wrapping, labeling and so forth. We did work in a little time today for fun in the form of making Lemon Verbena HP soap (see below) and some useful (we hope) candles.
One of the scents we have is called "Bug be Gone" from Lebermuth ( +Lebermuth Co ) . It contains the finest of essential oils including citronella, lemongrass, orange, eucalyptus and litsea cubeba - all of which are known to repel bugs and pesky flying insects.
We are hoping that our customers dislike pesky flying insects as much as we do. The future plan is to make some "Bug be Gone" scented soap that you rub on your skin before heading outdoors, the bugs leave you alone, then when you take a shower you just soap it off, you'll be clean and have no bug bites (nirvana!!!) Stay tuned for BBG soap updates!
Making candles really isn't that difficult once you get the hang of it. We are still learning new things, though. One thing in particular is called a flash point.
All essential oils and fragrance oils have a flash point. This is a temperature at which the scent will simply "flash," or, burn off. If we add essential or fragrance oils when the soap or candles are heated up past the flash point, the fragrance dissapates or cooks off and there will be no scent in the finished item. Since scent is what this whole process is about, we are very careful about flash points. Several times in our candle making ventures we've had to let the wax cool down before adding the scent; we have to have the scent!
The following picture is "A" carefully pouring "BBG" into the jars.
Here is the picture of the BBG candles once they had cooled down, very pretty pale yellow.
It's really a pale yellow, the color in the picture below is spot on.
This batch of soap that we made today will be the last one we will have time to make until the Mountain Laurel Festival is over.
We decided to use one of the scents we both love, and that people have requested - Lemon Verbena. We have used it in bath salts and sugar scrubs and now soap. We used the HP (hot process) method today with our traditional recipe of palm, olive, coconut and castor oils mixed with the lye/water. We decided to use a little yellow colorant to give the Lemon in the lemon verbena a little punch, we also added titanium dioxide (TD) to lighten the soap a little.
The oils melted in the crock pot while the lye was cooling. Once the oils were all melted, we added the lye/water and gave it a few jolts from the stick blender; it began to emulsify immediately.
We stirred it for a few minutes and got it to light/medium trace pretty quickly, we covered the crock pot and waited about 15 minutes. When we peeked we found the soap had hardened somewhat and was gelling on the edges of the pot.
If you look closely you can see the gel on the edge, it's a slightly different color and looks almost translucent.
We've been reading a lot about HP soap making and learned that the more you stir the soap the more evenly it will cook, so we are stirring this HP soap quite a bit. In the picture below you can see the stage called "mashed potato", honestly it looks exactly like potatoes, almost good enough to eat (if it didn't smell all soapy).
While the soap looks like mashed potatoes on the surface, it is still cooking, and slowly the whole batch begins to look like it's gelling. In the picture below, you can see the gelling underneath the "potatoes"; this is why we kept stirring.
The next picture is a close up of the previous one, it shows the gel up close on the right side.
Now the object is to incorporate all the lumpy "potato" clumps into the gelled soap, the soap is pretty stiff at this point which turns the stirring into a mini work out.
In the picture above you can see it's mostly gel with a few lumps, total time elapsed is about 1-1/2 to 2 hours at this point. We wanted to get all the little lumps stirred down into the soap. Which is what the next picture shows.
As you can see we have very few lumps left, the soap is kind of satiny looking, very glossy and smooth, we keep on stirring.
After we reached this smooth stage we kept stirring and testing using PH sticks, which we discovered are pretty much worthless. So we relied on the zap test, it tasted like soap, but just for good measure we cooked it another 5 minutes! The point here is to be sure that the lye has completely reacted with the oils to make soap leaving no trace of lye behind.
We added the lemon verbena scent to the soap, then once it was thoroughly mixed we added the titanium dioxide (TD) to whiten the soap. We took about 3 - 4 cups of soap out and put it into a measuring cup in which we mixed in the yellow colorant. Once the yellow was mixed we then spooned it back into the crock pot and softly swirled the yellow into the white just enough to make a "lemon" statement.
The soap cured for 24 hours then looked like this (picture below): (pretty much the same way it did when we put it in yesterday)
Let us just say this soap smells amazing! It's a fresh, clean, lemony scent that is great! Here is the group shot.
You can see the hint of yellow threaded through the soap in the last shot. Come by the Soap Lily booth and smell for yourself on Saturday.
We can't close out our Monday post without a giant thank you to "K's" husband "A"
(oh gosh, these initials are getting too confusing!).
Ok, a giant thank you to Kathy's husband Arty who presented her with the best Mother's day gift ever... a 10 x 10 shade tent!!! Isn't it interesting how after 40 plus years jewelry, diamonds, etc don't mean a thing? Give a girl a shade tent and it's the best gift ever! We will post pictures of the tent set up with our soap (and Soap Lily banners) next week. Maybe we can even try to really be on top of our technology and blog a little while we're at the festival. We'll see... :-)
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