Soap Lily: What do you do on a rainy Tuesday?

Tuesday October 14, 2014

The weather was so stinky today! It rained, non stop ALL day long. It would have been a great day to curl up on the couch with that great book we've been trying to finish, but reading was not in the cards for us. We made two batches of soap and cooked up a "re-batch" that had never quite worked out the first time.

We will divide this post into two separate sections, and we will try to be brief. First the re batch:

The first soap we ground up was one we had called Mosaic.

We discovered what "seizing" meant when we originally tried to make this soap. In a nutshell, some FOs react badly when they are added to the batter. The oil causes the batter to harden almost immediately, and that is exactly what happened to us the first time we used a lovely scent called Butterfly Meadows - just one of the many, many lessons we've learned.

We did our first ever rebatch and came out with a soap looked ok and smelled great, so we tried to sell it. Our guess is it didn't look quite so good when compared to some of our other, more polished looking bars. So it didn't sell. Eventually we stopped trying to sell it and put it in our "future rebatch" basket.

We had tried another batch of Butterfly Meadows, this time HP. Unfortunately the colors weren't very appealing, and the bars were small, so it didn't sell either. It too went into the basket.

(This is after we had cut the bars into smaller pieces to fit

into the Cuisinart. This is NOT what it looked

like when we had it for sale.)

There was one more soap that we had forgotten about. It was something Alison and her daughter made to test a shape idea, so they didn't fragrance it. It was a light aqua color so we decided what the heck and added it to the butterfly meadow rebatch.

Kathy enlisted the help of her granddaughter in cutting up the soap. Don't worry! She was very careful as her grandmother was reminding her (actually harping) about knife safety the whole time,
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This is what the Mosaic soap looked like after a spin in Kathy's Cuisinart.

You probably can't see the different colors in this picture, but we have added the yellow, dark blue and white Butterfly Meadows to the Mosaic which was in the bag already.

Then Alison remembered the aqua soap, so we grated and added it in too.

Lovely isn't it? Above is what the soap looked like (through the plastic bag) after sitting in boiling water for about an hour. It still has lots of visible pieces of the grated soaps.

After 2 hours or so the consistency looked right, there are still a few pieces, we will call them character chips!

We added about 2 ounces of Butterfly Meadows FO to the mixture.

The addition of the FO definitely made the soap smell divine, but it also made it much easier to squeeze out of the bag.

Once it was all in the mold we slammed it down several times,

hopefully hard enough to prevent air bubbles.

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While Kathy was re batching, Alison was preparing a double batch (and a pinch) of HP soap.

We are learning which fragrances sell better than others, and the batch(es) Alison made today are the very popular Total Hot Man and Sweet Patchouli which we keep selling out of.

Sweet Patchouli fragrance oil from Nature's Garden has been a very popular fragrance.

It is great for HP soap because it has such a high flash point.

We use Bramble Berry's Light Gold Mica to add a bit of luster to

a thin top layer of the soap.

The main part of the Sweet Patchouli soap has colloidal oatmeal stirred in for its

exfoliating and soothing properties. We ground organic oatmeal and had it ready and waiting.

We used Total Hot Man from Nature's Garden for the other half of the batch. Happily for us,

this fragrance oil has a high flash point, too.

This soap will have a hot stripe of Copper Sparkle Mica,

also from Bramble Berry

We added silk to this batch of soap by cutting it into very small pieces and

dissolving it in the lye/water.

Above is Alison pouring the lye/water/silk mixture into the oils which we had already melted

and had waiting in the warm crock pot. Notice the gloves and arm protectors? Maybe one day

we'll be brave and show a whole picture of us in aprons and masks, too. Mmmmm, maybe not.

After the first 30 minute cook time the batter had

gelled and looked like this. Go ahead. Laugh. We did.

We stirred and then cooked the soap for another hour, stirring every 15 minutes. This seems to be the perfect timing for the way we do our HP soap; however, we don't simply time it and assume that it is always done. We still Ph test it and zap test it. We do want to be thorough and be sure.

Remember we said that we made a double batch and a pinch? Well, here comes the pinch.

We have had a request for some kudzu soap with actual kudzu leaves used in the batter as an exfoliate. The "pinch" of today's batch was a sample portion to test our Kudzu leaf soap.

We picked fresh kudzu leaves and dehydrated them (in the microwave oven) until they were

nice and dry and crispy, but not burned.

We then put the leaves into our grinder and chopped them as finely as possible.

Once we had the leaves chopped, we sifted them to get the finest portions we could and

to get rid of the larger pieces and veins of the leaves.

Using a dropper, we put in about 30 drops of our Kudzu fragrance oil from +Natures Garden.

It didn't create a strong scent, but rather added just a hint of fragrance.

We stirred in the finely chopped kudzu

and then put the batter into a few small mold shapes. (We lightly sprayed the mold with

non-stick spray first to be sure the soaps would come out cleanly. We didn't use much, just a quick spray, then we removed excess with a paper towel.) Once we had the batter in place, we sprinkled a bit of the remaining ground kudzu on top of a few of the soaps.

I'm ready for my closeup Mr. DeMille!

Following the Kudzu came the Sweet Patchouli and the Total Hot Man. We divided the batter in half (half man, half patchouli) and jumped into creating two more loaves of soap.

Into half of the batter we mixed the Sweet Patchouli fragrance oil.

Then we removed about a cup of the scented batter.

Into the larger portion of scented batter, we added just over a tablespoon of colloidal

oatmeal. A customer who loves our Patchouli soap mentioned that she thought there was a

bit too much oatmeal in it, so we ground it up even finer this time and put less into the batter.

We are always ready to improve our product, and we try to listen and fine tune when we can.

Into the cup that we reserved (no oatmeal), we mixed the Light Gold Mica.

This just adds a bit of luster to the top of the soap.

We added the oatmeal layer to the mold and tamped it down.

Then we spread the Gold Mica layer on top. The above photo shows the thin layer

before we had smoothed it evenly over the loaf of soap.

The Patchouli was done, so we moved it into the curing room and started working on the final soap of the day, Total Hot Man.

We left this half of the batter in the crock pot to keep it warm and soft while we

worked on the Kudzu and the Patchouli. But finally we were ready to add the Total Hot Man

fragrance oil. +Natures Garden describes the scent as follows: This fragrance is centered around a note of patchouli, balanced by fresh sage, crispy green notes, and freshly sliced mango; all sitting on base notes of earthy sandalwood and tonka bean.