What can we say? We are sorry that we've neglected the blog.
So blog, we are sorry; we have excellent reasons why you have been neglected.
It's hard to blog while riding a bike, or sitting on the beach (Alison), and just as hard while filling in at your old job (Kathy). Yes, we both spent all of last week doing other things. Lucky for Alison, she and her family were at Tybee Island. I didn't make it to a beach, but thankfully had a nice cool week to be working at a heating and air business.
This week started out with us catching up. We have a ton of soap that has cured in the last 10 days. We spent Monday and Tuesday printing labels, doing cost sheets, checking out the great new fragrance oils and generally "getting back into gear".
Several weeks ago we participated in the annual yard sale/antique market at Homestead House (511 Grant St., Clarkesville) www.homesteadhouseprimitives.com During the course of the day, owner Leigh Johnston asked us to create some "primitive" looking soap out of a few of her favorite scents. We got busy and started making soap using the HP (hot process) method. When we used color, we used muted tones for the scents she requested including Kudzu, Honeysuckle, Honey Almond Oatmeal, and Lemongrass Mint. Homestead House is located in an authentic 1700's log cabin. It is filled with goodies such as primitive furniture, period upholstery, and a variety of early American merchandise. They had to add on a "barn" section to hold it all.
We delivered the soap to them, and now we have our fingers crossed that her customers will love it and we will get a reorder soon.
After all the paper work, deliveries, catching up, etc., we finally got down to making a re-batch of Grandpa soap. The popularity of this soap caught us by surprise, or at least it caught me by surprise. Alison loved it from the beginning. It has slowly grown on me, and the more we sell, the better I like it. The scent is Tobacco and Bay leaf from +Bramble Berry, and it has a nice blend of scents that incorporate bay leaf and fir needle mingled with cedarwood and bergamot. Our customers love it!
Tobacco & Bay Leaf Scent
We are using the HP (hot process) method this time and hope to layer the same colors we used in the first CP (cold process) funnel poured batch we made. It looked like the photo below when we finished.
Our first batch of CP Grandpa soap
We used a combination of micas and oxides for our colors. The titianum dioxide is to lighten the batter, we know it won't be white, we just don't want it to be yellow.
Colors from +Bramble Berry, oxides and mica
Since we used the HP method, we melted all the oils (castor, avocado, coconut, olive, rice bran and shea butter) in the crock pot then added the lye/water.
As we started blending, the batter was loose and very liquid.
After five minutes or so our batter was at light/medium trace. We put the lid on the crock pot and started cooking, checking the progress every fifteen minutes.
What the batter looked like when we had light/medium trace.
After the 1st fifteen minutes, as you can see in the photo above, the soap was bubbling up (gelling) on the side, and the color had changed to off white.
A photograph doesn't show you how solid the batter is, but check out the spatula. Notice that it is sticking right out of the batter on it's own; the batter is that hard.
The batter is so stiff that the spatula pulled apart leaving the paddle in the batter and the handle, uh naked! We used a stainless steel spoon and mixed up the batter, then set the timer for another 15 minutes.
We have mentioned the gel phase. If you look closely in this picture, you can see areas of the batter that are darker and kind of slick looking. This is what the batter looks like as it goes through gelling - a part of the saponification process - as the ingredients turn into soap.
Another term you have heard us mention is "mashed potato stage." The picture above shows what that stage looks like. At this point we are almost done, but to be on the safe side we let it cook another fifteen to thirty minutes.
The soap is done, zap test was ok, PH strips are ok, it's been cooking for about 1-1/2 hours. You can see the cooked soap on the inside edge of the crock.
We had added some titanium dioxide early in the process to give us a lighter batter. Now it's time to add our scent, divide the soap batter, and add colorants. We have to move quickly because as the soap cools it hardens, and it's not easy putting hard soap batter into a mold.
We used green, red and blue colorants as you can see in this picture. We weren't happy with the blue, so we added another (brighter) shade of blue. We aren't sure that it helped much, but hopefully you will be able to tell it's blue once it's cured.
We started with a layer of red, then covered it with blue.
After the blue layer we added a layer of white.
The last layer was green. When we did the CP batch, we had several layers of each color, but because HP soap hardens so quickly we were only able to make one layer of each color.
Once we had all the soap in the mold we tamped it down several times to get rid of air bubbles. At this point we realized that we had forgotten to put in the outer dividers for the mold. Rather than cry, we slid them down the sides and hoped for the best. After tamping it a few more times for good luck we inserted the dividers.
After the soap cured for 24 hours, we removed it from the mold. The final result looks and smells great! Although it's not as fancy as the funnel pour CP soap, it smells just as good and even the blue looks good.
We were really curious to see what they inside layers looked like,
so we cut into one bar, and you can see the results below.
It isn't yellow, but a nice off-white, and yes, even the blue looks blue.
Grandpa scented HP soap bars weigh approximately 5 oz each and will be ready to use in a week.
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