Soap Lily: Goats Milk soap, two for the price of one!

September 24, 2012

Every time we do a show, customers always ask for Goats Milk Soap. We shrug and say we are going to make some soon. Our intentions were always good ones, but somehow we'd get side tracked, or head into a different direction. Well, the shrugging days are over. We've been churning out Goats Milk soap as fast as we can.

Today's blog is about how we created a double batch using two different scents. Hopefully there will be enough variety in our Goats Milk to make everyone happy.

We are using minimal coloration today, so we decided to add a mica sparkle to jazz the soap up a little. We add about a teaspoon full of the mica to the olive oil before its mixed with the other oils (coconut, palm kernel oil flakes, sweet almond, avocado, olive, and castor oils).

When the mica sparkle is mixed into the olive oil the design it makes is beautiful.

When it was added to the rest of the oils, all began to shimmer.

We added the lye/water in and mix with the stick blender.

We breezed right past light trace and head to medium/heavy trace.

Once we reached trace, we put the lid on and let it cook for 30 minutes.

Letting the soap cook for the first 30 minutes before stirring seems to work much better for us than stirring after just 15 minutes. At that point the batter has begun the gelling stage and is much easier to stir. After that, we do stir every 15 minutes.

We let the soap cook for 1-1/2 hours, and gave it a good stir. We've made numerous batches of HP soap in the last few weeks and it seems that cooking for 1-1/2 hours gives us a perfect batch of soap.

Once the soap was done, we added the last two liquids. Above you can see as we added honey water to the batter. This mixture consists of 3 ounces of distilled water and 1-3/4 TBL of local honey.

We retrieved the goats milk from the freezer.

It was almost frozen solid, but was a nice slushy mixture that we could still mix into the soap batter.

We measured out 1/2 of the batter to create two separately scented batches.

We added Green Irish Tweed (type) fragrance to one batch. It is a very clean, masculine scent described by Fragrance Buddy as a "spicy-sweet blend of Verbena and Lemon with base notes of sandalwood and Amber."

We added a fragrance oil blend to the other batch of soap. For this blend, we combined Cucumber Melon Cybilla and Cucumber Kiwi, both from Bramble Berry. Our blend created a luscious fragrance of fresh, clean cucumber, sweet melon, and a hint of kiwi.

We used Enchanted Forest Mica in both batches of soap, but we used them differently. Kathy sprinkled the mica and swirled it throughout the cucumber batch, topping it off with a light dusting for a sparkly decoration. Alison mixed the mica with oil, colored a portion of the Green Irish Tweed batter, then swirled it into the white portion of the soap.

Shown above is the sprinkling of mica Kathy swirled into the Cucumber Melon Kiwi batch of soap.

Pictured above, Kathy is placing the Cucumber-Melon-Kiwi batter into the mold.

This is Kathys' batch, with Enchanted Forest Mica sprinkled throughout the batter.

We didn't get a picture of it, but she sprinkled Enchanted Forest Mica on the top.

The above photo shows the two colors we used for the Green Irish Tweed that Alison made.

And, above you can see Alison has mixed her green batter into the white for an "in the pot" swirl.

She gently mixed the two colors together. She didn't want to over mix

because she was going for two distinct colors.

Alison filled her mold with the swirled batter.

Alison's soap is on the left, Kathy's is on the right and on the far right are two sample soaps of unscented soap. We took out those small samples before we added any of the fragrance oils. We wanted to see how an unscented soap would smell before we made a whole batch. (By the way, it was exactly as we had hoped - no smell! Yay!)