Soap Lily: Sometimes it's Kathy, today it was Alison

Friday August 1, 2014

What's up with Alison you might ask? Maybe it started with her having to paint her son blue this morning (for band camp), or the horrible almost asthma she was dealing with that kept her up last night, or maybe it was because the fragrance that she was positively swooning over didn't quite work out.

You can probably tell this is Kathy writing tonight. Alison and her family are making their yearly excursion to visit friends in Brevard, NC (a place both of us love). So, I will fill in the blanks for you on our latest soaping adventure.

We read about soap, heck we probably dream about it, but in this case what we read is about adding tussah silk to the lye/water. We've seen it in youtube videos about soap, we've read about it on other blogs, and on web sites, silk, silk, silk. It makes the soap shiny, smooth and very very (what else) - silky. So we bought some silk and today we used it for the first time.

Our research indicates that we don't really need to add too much to a batch. We added about a cotton ball size into the just mixed lye water.

This is what the silk looks like in the bag - kind of a blonde wig gone bad.

This is the silk up close; it has been chopped into small segments. As I said we only used a cotton ball amount, so we should have plenty for many batches to come.

Since we decided to do a half batch apiece, we each picked a scent (from our many, many sample sizes), and we chose the colors we wanted to use. I chose a scent from www.fragrancebuddy.com , a new supplier for us located just north of Atlanta. I decided to use some of the new colors we recently got from +Rustic Escentuals.

The Aborigine Amber will give me a soft brown and I'll mix it with Cornflower Celebration (blue). My scent is called Black Cedarwood and Juniper by Jo Malone Type Fragrance. I think that means they have duplicated a Jo Malone scent, the description says, and remember they are trying to sell something here - "Midnight rain. Seductive with the carnal touch of cumin and chili leaves. Dark with cedarwood. Humid with moss. Modern and Urban". That is quite a pitch!! It does smell nice though, hopefully the soap will smell good too.

Alison decided to do an in the pot swirl. She mixed up three colors - the Aborigine Amber, Black Mica and a bit of Titanium Dioxide, once mixed it became a nice warm grey color with hints of brown. The scent she chose is one she LOVES, every time we start checking scents she gravitates to this one - Suede and Lace, the description says: Suede, woody, earthy, A fresh and clean aroma full of leather and white musk.

After we mixed the lye and water together, we added the silk. The above picture shows what it looked like right after it was dropped in the liquid. We had to stir for about 10 minutes straight to get the silk completely dissolved.

In this picture we had just added the lye/silk/water to the oils, the stick blender is going causing the emulsification to begin. We stirred until we had light/medium trace.

Looking good, nice and smooth, at this point we evenly divided the batter. We almost simultaneously added the scents to our halves, a pivotal moment.

In this picture Alison has just added Suede and Lace,. Once she began mixing the scent in.....that's when she noticed something was amiss.

At the same time I mixed about 1/2 cup batter into both of the colors i had chosen. I added a layer of white then alternated blue, white, brown, then repeated, three times total.

This is the first two layers, each succeeding layer looked pretty much the same only with different colors.

In this picture the side is almost filled. I covered the top then did a quick hanger swirl.

I had a little batter left, so poured both colors mixed with some of the white with on top then swirled it.

Alison added her scent, then removed about 1/4 of her batter and added the color. Within 30 seconds of her adding the scent she noticed little lumps forming in her batter, in this picture you can see them.

Alison mixed the colored batter back into the non-colored and gently swirled it in the bucket. This is called an "in the pot swirl". The little bumps were multiplying, and it was just her batter, so it must have been her scent, and it just had to be the one she loves so much!

Not fair!

Alison has mixed the colors for an in the pot swirl, poured it into the mold, lots and lots of bumps, we came to the conclusion that this must be ricing, nothing to worry about - so they say - just strange to look at.

Here Alison has added the last bit of uncolored batter to the top of her mold, after she spread it out she gently swirled it.

And this is the pretty design on the top, the ricing seems to be diminishing - somewhat. I guess when we cut the soap, we will know if it's truly nothing to worry about.

We discussed the difference between today's two soaps and decided that it had to be fragrance oil related. Both soaps came from the same batter, and everything was exactly the same until we added FOs.

We sprayed the soap with alcohol every 30 minutes for the first hour and a half to prevent ash build up. So far so good. This picture (above) is about an hour out. You can plainly see Alison's soap (on left) going through the gel phase, it looks darker because the center part of the soap is gelling, which is part of the saponification process.

So far my soap on right looks ok.

This picture was taken about 6 hours later, the gelling has stopped and the soap looks great, unfortunately there is a slight crack in the top, but that is probably from the heat that built up in the loaf as it went through the gel phase. There is just going to have to be a crack.

Even though we sprayed and sprayed with alcohol consistently, I have ash on the top of my soap. It looks like little light colored swirls here and there. Again, not much we can do, there is just going to be ash on this soap. Ash doesn't hurt anything and it doesn't mean that there is anything wrong with the soap. It is a sometimes by-product of the saponification process, and it just means that the soap isn't as pretty as we like for our soaps to be.

I will check the soap on Saturday to see if it's ready for cutting. If so, I'll take a few pictures then post to the blog. Hope everyone has a happy, safe weekend.

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It's Saturday so I unmolded the soap in mid-afternoon. It's hard to tell if Alison's soap is ok. At this point it's still rather soft and needs to cure a bit to see where the colors are going to go. It smells great.