Soap Lily: Courting disaster, we learned a lesson about lye, and managed to make some soap

Thursday June 5, 2014

Ever since we started even thinking about making soap, we've been heeding warnings about lye. We wear goggles, gloves, and aprons; we mix the lye in a separate room (away from everything); we announce ourselves when bringing mixed lye water back into the kitchen; we try to do it by the book. Today, however, we had lye issues.

When I began pouring and measuring the lye it seemed as if it was full of static electricity, when about 3/4 of the amount we needed was in the bowl the lye crystals began jumping out of the glass bowl, It went on the floor, got all over the scale, stuck to the exterior of the plastic container it came in, bounced and jumped all over the counter, it was crazy. I was still trying to measure the correct amount of lye so called Alison to come take a look. The following picture is what she saw.

If you watch closely, just as I stop pouring, you can see a few beads of lye jumping up out of the bowl. It was almost like static electricity or static cling. The beads seemed to be attracted to the outside of the bottle, but they didn't all stick to it. They fell off and bounced EVERYWHERE.

We have no idea why this happened, we measured and poured the lye exactly as we have done every time we make soap, we always use the same bowl. As you can imagine, soap production stopped while we cleaned and mopped the floor, I have dogs and they don't need to ingest lye off the floor. We mopped 2 times then sloshed white vinegar on the floor, then rinsed again, same with the countertop.

To show you how dangerous lye can be I am showing you a picture of the top of my foot. I was wearing flip flops and evidently a grain of lye got beneath the strap. initially it didn't hurt and I didn't realize the lye bead was behind the strap, but after about 1 hour I noticed my foot was burning on the top, I checked and had a big red spot on the top, after removing the flip flop I noticed a small hole in my skin! Yikes, this is what lye can do, thankfully it was tiny, would hate to think about lye sloshing all over an arm or leg!

So now we know, while making soap wearing flip flops, sandals or being barefoot (remember the hot wax a few weeks ago) is probably not a great idea. That is our public service announcement for today, now back to soap making.

Lily of the Valley EO (essential oil) was chosen for the scent, as we both love the beautiful little flowers that smell delightfully, but bloom and die off so quickly in the spring. We did not used titanium dioxide (TD) in the soaps we just made, and they all turned out a creamy light color. For this soap we decided to make another batch without it Lily of the Valley would be a simple soap with only one added color chrome green mica.

We decided to mix the chrome green powder into about a 3/4 of a cup of batter.

Today we wanted to do a hanger swirl but didn't have the hanger ready, we will show you that in another post as it's a technique we really want to try. This batch would be a layered swirl of some sort, actually we were kind of flying by the seats of our pants.

Using the Old Faithful recipe we mixed the oils and lye/water at about 95 degrees, we were hoping to have a runny batter, but once again it didn't happen. After it emulsified the scent was added and 3/4 cup of batter removed to mix the green mica in. Once the green was mixed and set aside we poured the white batter into the mold.

It was 99.9% white. I dropped a small amount of green in by mistake; that is what you see in the batter as I am pouring it into the mold below. We noticed that the soap was thickening fast - again. Darn, we wanted it to be more liquid.

We wanted a nice thick layer of white on the bottom, we tamped it down after we poured.

Next we added the green layer, it's probably about 1/8 to 1/4" thick, and might be a little thicker in spots, we weren't going for perfection just contrast. We kept a couple of tablespoons of the green to add to the top for a decorative look.

We made sure to get the green into all the corners by tamping it down, this also helps remove air bubbles.

When the green layer was completed, we went back to the white batter which was supposed to be pouring smoothly. As you can see, it was so thick we had to spoon it out of the pot. This wasn't what we wanted.

We finished off by adding (shoveling) the rest of the white batter into the mold and tamping it down.

Once the mold was filled with the white batter we used a skewer and swirled (just a random pattern nothing specific or planned) all the way to the bottom & through all the layers.

Then we added the few remaining Tablespoons of the green with a little white to lighten it a bit. We dropped spoonfuls of the light green across the top, then for swirled the top and flared the edges.

Pretty isn't it, all we have to do is wait until Friday and see how it looks when it's cut.

It's Friday, midday and the Lily of the Valley soap is being unveiled, this is what we saw when we opened the curing box!

If you look closely you can see a crack along the top of the soap.

here is a close up! not sure why this happened, research, research, research...

Once the log of soap was out of the mold and paper liner removed this is the side view.