Wednesday, an energetic day for us!

Wednesday May 28, 2014

Since school is officially over here in Habersham County, Alison's daughter will be our official assistant, lackey, gopher, scent consultant, apprentice and entertainment for the next few months.  We get lots of good ideas, (young ones that we don't think of) from her, so as long as she can stand it she's a junior Soap Lily!

One of the scents that we all have LOVED ever since it was unpacked is Energy.  We bought ours at Bramble Berry ( +Bramble Berry ) and their description is as follows:

 "A stimulating blend of Citrus, including Grapefruit, Lemon and Lime, with hints of fresh Cucumber and Jasmine, and a touch of Pineapple, Blackberry and Champagne"

That pretty much sums it up, but you really can't imagine how good this fragrance is - it just pops. It's so great that we all just smile and (almost) break out in a happy dance (okay - maybe we actually did, but there are no pictures to prove it).  The colors we used all say "energy" to us, they are bright orange, yellow and pink.

In case you can't read the labels in the picture, the colors are, from L - R, fired up fuchsia, fizzy lemonade and Tangerine WOW ,  the picture below shows what they looked like mixed up and ready to add to the soap mixture.

In addition to all the energetic colors, we added TD (titanium dioxide) to make sure that the soap stays as light as possible and so the contrast will give you lots of energy.  Ok that was a little lame, just couldn't think of anything cool to say as to why we add the TD.

In this soap we used (sustainable) palm, olive, coconut and castor oils and mixed them with a lye/water combination.  Since we had decided to swirl our colors, we kept the oil temperature around 90- 95 and the lye water at just under 100 degrees F (or within 10 degrees of each other).  Keeping the temperature down makes it trace slower which in turn gives us time to be creative.  

Once we had the oils and lye/water mixed, we used the stick blender so it was mixed well We then added the Energy FO and the TD to the soap batter and mixed them in well.  We poured (3) measuring cups to about 2/3 c. full with the soap, we then added the colors to each.  The remainder of the soap we then poured into the mold, tamped down a few times then began the coloring process.  

We poured a stream of orange soap batter across the mold, going in three different sections, we then followed with yellow and finished with the fuchsia,  The following pictures show you how we added each color.

Next we added the yellow. 

You can see that the soap is thickening and holding it's shape; this is what is called a heavy trace. It was getting a little hard to pour out of the measuring cups at this point.

Fuchsia was the last color we added; it seemed to bring it all together.

Now comes the fun part - the swirling.  We have to be careful that we don't get carried away and over swirl. If this happens our soap might lose the distinctive color application and wind up with a bland blend of colors that look like mush.  

It's interesting to see how a few swipes of a skewer can completely change how something looks.  We went from plain stripes to a neat design in 25 seconds!  Once we pulled the skewer from top to bottom we did a few L - R for the final design.

The last thing for today (other than cleaning up our mess) was to insert the dividers (which gives us 18 evenly sized bars), put the lid on, and then let it sit for 24 hours.

Due to the magic of all things electronic and computer related we now jump to Thursday afternoon,  after the soap had set up overnight we took it out of the mold.

As you can see, the swirling brought just a hint of all three colors right through the bars. The Energy scent is perfect for this soap, and we can't wait for our customers to try it.