Today was all about trying again when things didn't go as planned the first time. Alison created individual "flower" soaps a month or so ago. They look cute, but didn't pour or swirl exactly as planned. Today we decided to have a "do-over" and try and make the finished soap look as good as the picture.
After much discussion we came to the conclusion that one of the main reasons the earlier batch thickened to quickly was because the temperature was too hot. For today's batch we would keep the oils and lye/water at 90 degrees when we mixed them together. Since we were making soap with embedded flowers we chose Sweet Pea and Ivy FO from +Lebermuth Co. In an effort to further ensure a slow moving soap, we double checked to make sure there was nothing written about fast acceleration or seizing (some FO's will do this).
We decided to use the wood mold from +Bramble Berry, it has inserts that perfectly divide the finished soap into 18 bars.
For the colors we decided to make an bright African Daisy type flower, sort of like this:
so we chose yellow (fizzy lemonade) for the outer petals and a mixture of brick red and fired up fushia for the inner petals, and using a dab of chrome green for the center
It didn't take long for the soap to emulsify, and we wanted to keep the soap very liquid, so as soon as it had emulsified, we added the scent to the batter. Then we went ahead and mixed the colors before we had even a light trace.
Since we needed just enough to do the flowers ,we poured about 1/2 cup of batter into each color and mixed it well.
We filled the mold with the remaining basic batter, inserted the dividers and pressed them into the soap.
Alison said that this looks like ketchup and mustard - especially when we put them into the condiment bottles to make the designs.
Once it was mixed we poured the colored batter into squirt bottles.
Once we started on the flower designs, we noticed that the batter in the squirt bottles wasn't sinking into the soap. It was all supposed to be liquid, and the circles were supposed to just lie flat on the bars, actually becoming part of the surface of the soap. We tried submerging the tip of the bottle into the soap, but it didn't really work either.
Once we had made the color circles on each bar of soap, we began to use the skewer technique to create the flower design. Just like Alison experienced the last time she tried this design, we noticed the swirls we were making with the skewers were leaving trails in the soap; it was thickening that fast.
This kind of looks like a Target commercial gone bad, or a bulls eye chart that is off kilter. No matter, we kept swirling and dabbing at our flowers.
In this picture if you look carefully you can see the yellow batter kind of in the batter while the red and green are fairly prominent on the top.
Once the swirling was done we both stood back and just sighed. Foiled again, this is not what we wanted, rather than sun flowers this looks like Poinsettias Gone Wild, or Red Spider Lilies. Maybe once it cures it will look better....not what we planned though.
To give you an idea about how hard the batter got, this is where we put the left over from squirt bottles, looks like a free form sculpture, it was so thick I couldn't even swirl it.
We just can't figure it out. We followed the recipe from lovinsoap.com and followed the example for flowers on cold process soap. The first two times we used this recipe, it stayed very liquid as it was supposed to. What happened these last two times to make it thicken so quickly?
One of the parts of soap making we never show you is "clean up," we have to keep the gloves on because the soap batter still has lye in it, and believe me there is soap everywhere. The squirt bottles were pretty tough to clean.
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Even though we are making soap we have to change the sink water (and add new detergent) several times. There is so much oil in the soap it's hard to get off without using plenty of dish detergent.
Sorry about the sink full of dishes. The soap business is not always glamorous, and pretty. Just thought you'd like to know.
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Thursday, June 5, 2014
Want to see what it looks like after being insulated for 24 hours?
Around the edges of each bar, we still see some gel. We will leave it in the mold for a bit longer before we see how the individual bars look
Later Thursday afternoon we checked the soap again and it looked fine so we took it out of the mold.
Please don't scroll back up and compare the soap to the flower, we didn't get even close!
and for the last shot
This soap will cure in six weeks, inspite of the hard to identify "flower" it smells heavenly.
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