Soap Lily: July 2014

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Lots of wine-ing going on today!

Monday, July 28, 2014

We've seen recipes both online and in our books for soaps that incorporate wine rather than water for the liquid. Somehow nothing surprises us with regard to soap making. All sorts of ingredients can be used, from fruits and veggies right over to milk and wine, a veritable smorgasboard! When we stopped and thought about it, we realized that we have actually used milks including coconut, butter, and almond, fresh mint, chamomile tea, carrots, oatmeal, honey, and so forth. Why not wine?!

I (Alison) have a friend (Mike) who makes homemade wine, and he generously offered several bottles for us to use as guinea pigs in our wine soap endeavor. Can a bottle of wine be a guinea pig? In this case, oh yes. Mike gave us a nice variety of wines ranging from a sweet white to several different reds.

I decided to start with the white. My son took down the names of the wines for me as Mike boxed them for us, but he put those notes in his iPod, and I can't crack the code right now.He changes the code periodically to keep his sister out of it, and he isn't home at the moment for me to make him hand over the code.

I think Mike called the white wine something like Gewürztraminer, but as I don't speak German and I came up with that name by Googling German white wines, it is very possible that I am wrong.

The reds include a blackberry chardonnay, a malbec, a merlot, and a brunello.

From what we've read, there are a couple of different schools of thought regarding alcohol content in soap making. Some advice says that we should cook the alcohol out of the wine as it won't mix well with lye, and that in fact it would be dangerous. Others suggest that the alcohol content doesn't really matter, but that the wine should be frozen before adding the lye.

I will try it both ways to see, but for this first attempt, I decided to try removing the alcohol first.

I wanted to make the soap on Monday, so I had to get the wine into the freezer Sunday night. First I reduced the volume of the wine by half by slowly simmering the wine and cooking out the alcohol. I poured the remaining liquid into ice cube trays and let it freeze overnight.

This is the frozen wine. We had to add a little distilled water to get to the proper weight needed for the soap recipe.

You are probably getting tired of hearing "old faithful," but that has become our basic "go to" recipe. It is by far our favorite, and it never disappoints us. We mixed the oils together (coconut, palm, olive and castor) then added the lye to the frozen (slushy) wine/water combination.

This is what the lye - wine/water combination looked like once it was mixed together. Interesting that a white wine, when reduced and combined with lye, has a red tint.

We mixed the lye/wine-water into the oils and used the stick blender until we were at light trace.

Since we had decided to do a double batch to test some more new sample fragrances, each side of the divided mold would have a different scent. It is unfortunate, we think, that the scent of the wine does not really survive the reaction with the lye. I love how wine smells, and my house smelled great while the wine was simmering. But, alas, an EO or FO is needed to create a wine soap with a pleasing scent.

We tried to choose fragrance oils that somehow relate to wine. Ok. We admit that it may seem like a stretch. The Sweet Orange Chili Pepper is a wonderful fruity scent with a hint of spice, so we decided that we would use it and call the soap Sangria (I did say it was a stretch, didn't I?). As for the Tuscan Fields, well, many great wines come from Italy. Tuscany is in Italy. Grapes are grown in fields. Right? C'mon use your imagination! we sure did!

We used these two "wine related" (see above) scents.

We divided the batter into two equal parts.

We had decided to use the hanger swirl technique using only one color for each fragrance. Tuscan Fields is green and "Sangria" is the rusty red.

We mixed each color in a cup of batter

We started with a layer of uncolored batter, tamping it down after each addition.

Initially, we were only going to put one layer of color, but we realized that a cup of colored batter was more than we thought, so we ended up making several alternating layers.

Once we had all the soap layers in place we hanger swirled each side. You can see the "Sangria" side (left) isn't quite as full as the right side, the divider slipped a little and caused the batches to be a little uneven.

Here I am using the hanger tool we made to swirl the Tuscan Fields side.

Once I was finished, I added a little white and green batter to the top and added a swirl effect. I was quite pleased with how it came out.

Kathy did the same thing to the "Sangria" side. She topped it off with remaining white and colored batter then swirled.

We put the soap in the curing box then sprayed it with alcohol several times to prevent ash build up.

While we were cleaning up we noticed the great bubbles and later created from this soap.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

We were so excited today to unmold the soap and cut it into bars, but we had to contain our excitement a bit longer. As we took the loaves from the mold, we could tell that it was still too soft to cut. We didn't want to take a chance on ruining our beautiful soap by being impatient, so we put the loaves back into the mold and will check again tomorrow.

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Kathy cut the soap into bars today, and the results look really nice!

Sangria

Tuscan Fields

These wine soaps should be ready by September 5.

Tuesday, July 29, 2014

A Treat For Our Four-legged Friends!

Monday, July 28, 2014

Alison has a dog. Kathy has three dogs. Our parents, kids, and friends all have dogs.

We all love our four-legged family members; however, as any dog owner knows, sometimes doggies smell, well, less than wonderful. Sometimes they roll in stuff, and we aren't always sure what the stuff is, (dead animal, cow poo, horse poo, creek water...can you tell we live in the country?) but it stinks.

Today we attempted to create dog friendly soap that will change our lives and the smell of our dogs. We considered a fancy, cool name, but settled instead on the unique(??) "Dog Soap." Okay! It's not great, but the message is loud and clear.

We used a variation of old faithful, using palm kernel flakes, coconut oil, olive oil and castor oil. For smell we used all essential oils - peppermint, eucalyptus and lemongrass.

Can you see how full the crock pot is?

The recipe variation we used today was originally written on a smaller scale. When we multiplied the amounts to increase the volume, we ended up making a small bit more than usual. To be honest, once we had all of the oils melted in the pot, we had a moment of worry that the lye/water mixture wouldn't all fit.

We needn't have worried, though. It all fit, and we proceeded as usual.

After the 1st fifteen minute interval, the mixture was very hard. This is normal and happens with most every batch of HP soap we make. The spatula is standing up on its own, nothing is holding it in place.

Perhaps it was because we had a larger volume than we had in past recipes, but this batch seemed to take longer to cook. We cooked it for close to three hours.

While the soap cooked, we stayed busy and our creative juices were flowing. We made a double batch of soap using wine - yes, wine! - for most of the liquid. Details of our wine soap are in a separate blog post titled (are you ready?),"Lots of wine-ing going on today." For now, though, back to the Dog Soap.

We finally saw the mashed potato stage that we look for. Yay!

Once the soap had completed the cook phase as determined by 3 different Ph tests and two zap tests (apiece), we had to keep an eye on the temperature.

The EOs in this recipe have different flash points. The lemongrass and the peppermint both had flash points around 70 degrees C, or, somewhere between 155-160 degrees F. The Eucalyptus, however, has a lower flashpoint. We had to let the soap cool to 120 degrees F before we could add the Eucalyptus.

That was not an easy job today. The soap really wanted to harden as it began to cool, but we kept stirring the batter and mashing up any spots that tried to harden on us. It took a while, and we did make use of an ice water bath to speed up the cooling process a bit, but we soon were able to add the Eucalyptus oil.

At that point, Kathy had the task of getting the batter into the mold before it hardened too much to press into place. She is good, though, and it wasn't long before she had the soap in the mold, and we were putting the dividers in place.

With the flash point of the Eucalyptus EO being so low, this soap would be much easier to work with at a lower temperature, so we decided our next batch of Dog Soap will probably be a CP (cold process) batch. A CP soap will be much smoother looking, but it will have the same fragrance and same dog-cleaning abilities.

As we mentioned, this batch, by volume, is bigger so the bars will be a bit larger than what we usually have.

What great bubbles! Won't our furry friends love this?
Okay, we know of a few in particular that will not love it at all, but
we think it will be a great addition to doggie bath time!

These are some really nice, fat bars of soap.

We unmolded them on Tuesday, 7-29-14, and they will be ready to use in a week.

Flash forward to August 13, 2014 - today Kathy used, and documented (she forgot to take pictures the first time) one of her dogs getting shampooed with our luscious Dog Shampoo bar.

The following photos are of Hazel, a sweet Chocolate Lab, Hazel loves the creek, the creek water isn't scented so Hazel often smells funky. Today was no exception, essence of funk! So I trapped her on the front porch, tricked her with doggie treats and gave her a bath.

Here she is, all soaped up, she was ignoring me because she didn't want a bath, you see she loves to smell funky.

She still won't look at me, I know she's busy protecting me from all the Hummingbirds pigging out in the feeders right over her head.

The soap lathers beautifully, and smells so much better than eau de la creek!

I will have to stop with the picture taking, she is obviously dejected.

Only one or two more pictures, here is the large bar of soap resting on her back. Time to rinse her off.

Close-up of the soap and lather. I rinsed her right after this picture was taken, once all the soap came off and I dried her fur she smelled great, and her coat was very shiny.

Now if I can just keep her out of the creek!

Christmas in July? sort of!

July 25, 2014

Either we are crazy or all the new "fall- winter" fragrances and colorants are kicking us into trying new things. In June, Alison was in the community theater play "Christmas Belles," and we have been noticing advertisements in Clarkesville the last few weeks that say, "Christmas in July!"

"Ha!" we said. "It's almost 90 degrees. No way!" But upon the arrival of a box of new fragrance oils, we are joining in the parade and creating soaps that definitely say fall/winter.

We have plenty of lighter spring/summer soap, and even though it's only mid summer, as we all know the holidays will be here in a blink. In the soap making world, if using the CP (cold process) method, the soap must cure for six weeks, and that brings us to September 5th. Yikes! At that point it is only around 111 days till you know what! So, we dove into the fall pool today making two split batches of soap.

Some of the new (and old) colors we used for these scents.

Alison and I decided to use four of the new FO (fragrance oils) that we just received from Fragrance Buddy and Rustic Escentuals, as well as several of the new colorants we bought from Rustic Escentuals.

We decided to make two batches of our almost invincible Old Faithful recipe using the CP (cold process method), dividing each batch into two for four different varieties of soap.

We added titanium dioxide to the batter to keep it as light in color as possible. We know ahead of time that some of these scents have vanilla which tends to turn the soap a little brown.

You can see the TD blending into the batter.

We stick blended the batter until we were at light/medium trace, then divided it in half and added the scents to each.

For some reason we forgot to take pictures of the Sugared Spruce 1/2 batch. I don't really know why except that we were just too preoccupied, I guess.

At any rate we used half of the TD lightened batter and colored it with a combination of the dark green Patina Sheen, Enchanted Forest, and light gold mica sparkle. We layered the colors and did a hanger swirl.

We did remember to take a few pictures of the Amish Harvest batch!

This is the Amish Harvest scent mixing into the batter, I had decided to do a hanger swirl so used only white batter and what you see in the next picture.

This is one of our new colors, Aborigine Amber mixed in a little safflower oil, we added a pinch of mica sparkle to jazz it up a little.

The Sugared Spruce batch is on the top and Amish Harvest on the bottom, here we have just added a layer of the colored batter, which we have be alternating with white.

This is what the Sugared Spruce looked like once it was finished, I had finished swirling and then added the remaining white batter so the top could be "artfully" tweaked.

The is the Amish Harvest batch, but I forgot to do the hanger swirl! We don't think it will make too much of a difference. The soap will still look good, and we know it will smell good.

Alison took over at this point and made two 1/2 batches with the second batch of Old Faithful. The FO's she used were Cranberry Salsa and Harvest Gathering.

Emma "Googled" cranberry salsa for me so we could choose colors that

would at least hint at cranberry salsa. We kept seeing cranberries, of course,

onions (or green onions), jalapenos, cilantro, sometimes cucumber or

celery, and a variety of liquors. We decided to use a cranberry color, an onion yellow color

and then sprinkle hints of green here and there. It did not occur to me until

we had poured the layers that these colors look like

ketchup and mustard.

Kathy and I decided to create layers of the colors and then use the hanger swirl technique. We have gotten a bit attached to that swirling method recently. We alternated the cranberry and onion colors with the white soap batter base.

First the layer of white, then a layer of cranberry.

Next, another layer of white followed by the yellow.

After the yellow, more white,

then a layer with a sprinkling of Enchanted Forest green.

Followed by another layer of white.

Another layer of cranberry (not ketchup!)

Then another layer of onion yellow (not mustard!) topped

off with a layer of white.

Next came some hanger swirling action.

With a final layer of white to top off the swirl.

Kathy gave it a little artistic tweak, and it the Cranberry Salsa was ready to cure.

My second fragrance was the Harvest Gathering. It is a delicious spicy apple blend. When I added the oil to the soap batter, it had a nice autumnal shade.

I wanted colors that had that an autumn feeling. With a fragrance like "Harvest Gathering," the colors had to be right. I used our new micas from Rustic Escentuals as shown below.

Kathy and I lined up the colors so they would be handy for the mica

swirl I had planned for this soap.

As I poured the layers of soap batter, Kathy sprinkled the different mica layers.

We started with the Enchanted Forest green.

After another layer of white, it was time for a layer of

Desert Sunbeam mica.

Next came another layer of white,

followed by a layer of 24 Karat Gold Mica.

That is the name of the color. We cannot guarantee that

the mica is actual 24 karat gold...

Next came another white layer, then Aborigine Amber and

another white layer.

Hanger swirl time!

When I had swirled the mica layers, I put one more layer of white on top, then Kathy sprinkled a mixture of Desert Sunset and 24 Karat Gold on top. We put both of the molds in the curing room until we could unmold them on Monday.

Monday's here!! July 28