Get ready! Today's blog is a photo blog. I put my son in charge of photography today, and let me tell you, he took the job seriously. I think I deleted as many if not more photos than I actually included below. Really. I'm not exaggerating!
Kathy and I have received a request for some more Honeysuckle soap, and we are more than happy to fill that request. Today, Kathy had a delivery to make and a few other Soap Lily stops to make in town, so since I had able and eager helpers at hand, my kiddos and I soaped while Kathy took care of other business necessities.
We made a hot process soap today using our faithful recipe of castor, olive, coconut, and sustainable palm oils. Below you can see Emma's hand stirring the oils to help them melt as I measured them into the crock pot.
Our Honeysuckle FO is a scent that we get from +Natures Garden and it really does smell just like honeysuckle.
I decided to use toned down colors but still try to remain true to the spirit of the honeysuckle vine, so I chose a yellow and green color to swirl into the soap. I decided NOT to use a titanium dioxide base throughout the whole soap, and instead left the base color to the natural color of the soap.
I used rice bran oil as the base for my colors.
The yellow that we have is just too bright for what I wanted today, so I chose to tone it down a bit with some copper. I was hoping for a darker shade of yellow.
For the green shade of the honeysuckle vine, I used the green chrome oxide and added a touch of patina sheen to darken the shade a bit.
As you can see below, the yellow came out as a very dark orange, which was not what I had in mind, but I didn't panic or give in.
I took a deep breath, then added more yellow. It wasn't yellow enough, so I added a bit more.
Finally I added a tiny bit of titanium dioxide to the yellow mixture. This gave me the color I wanted.
With the oils melted, the fragrance oil measured, the colors mixed, and the lye/water mixture measured and mixed, it was finally time to make the soap. So, I poured the lye/water into the oils and began to mix.
You can see the soap emulsify in this animated file thanks to google+!
I used the stick blender and mixed until the batter reached a medium to thick trace. See the trails in the surface of the batter in the following two pictures:
After mixing, we put the lid on the crock pot and set the timer for 15 minutes. We stirred every 15 minutes to be sure the batter was cooking evenly. The photo below is actually after about 30 minutes of cooking. In the picture, it may look like mashed potatoes, but in person it was still too watery. Plus, I now know from experience (WOW! Just a few months ago I would never have thought to call myself experienced...I still have a lot to learn I'm sure, but still...) that it had not possibly cooked long enough to think it was ready.
After about another 30 minutes the soap began to grow. Conor, Emma, and I were standing around the crock pot just watching it. Weird how things that would normally seem boring (who stands around watching a crock pot? Really?!), can become really interesting. This growing soap was definitely interesting. We made sure to keep stirring it to keep it cooking evenly.
I have read and seen videos about soap "volcanoing," and I did not want to see the mess that I have seen in some pictures, so we kept a close eye on it. We thought we would share a couple of the pictures with you.
We stirred it down again, and then left it to cook for another 15 minutes.
We checked it again here and decided to use a ph test strip. The soap was not ready. So we put the lid on and set the timer again.
Finally after a couple of hours total cooking time, we thought that the soap had finally reached the mashed potato stage. We performed another ph test using the paper strips. It seemed to indicate a good level finally (meaning that the lye was sufficiently cooked out of the mixture and we now have soap).
Actually, we have come to rely on the "zap test," and today was no different. I touched my tongue to it and felt no zap. Of course, Conor and Emma were fascinated by the idea of "tasting" soap, so they both wanted to try it, too. Conor got a bit too much on his tongue and spent a minute spitting over the sink. At the last minute, Emma backed up and decided that she might not be so eager after all.
Below, see the oil on the surface of the soap? This is when we added the honeysuckle fragrance oil. We mixed until we were sure the fragrance was evenly distributed throughout the batter.
I took about 2 cups of the batter and mixed the prepared yellow colorants into it. I only used about 2/3 of the yellow that I had created.
I used about a cup of batter and about 1/2 of the green colorants I had created to mix into the green portion of the soap.
Finally both colors were mixed and ready, so I added them back into the pot and gently swirled the three different colors together.
Then it was time to "plop" the soap into the mold. I did sling it in there pretty hard to try to get all of the air bubbles out of the soap.
After I plopped all of the soap into the mold, I banged it on the counter a few times, and then banged it on the floor a bit harder. If you've ever baked a cake and banged the cake pans on the counter to release the air bubbles, then you can picture what I was doing - except with a little more force.
Finally, Conor inserted the dividers and we set the soap aside to let it cool and harden. We will see what it looks like on Wednesday. You can see in the photo below the batter had darkened as it goes through the gel stage.
Wednesday morning and we are ready to unmold the soap. See below how it looks after hardening and cooling for about 24 hours in the mold? The natural "white" has become more prominent and the colors have settled into a very pleasing blend.
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We present...Honeysuckle!
The honeysuckle soap will be ready to use in a few days.
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