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!