Soap Lily: Wow-wee! WooHoo! What a Wednesday!

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

It was a very busy Wednesday in the Soap Lily kitchen, and that's how we like it! Part of the day involved cutting and taking photos of yesterday's soaps. We needed to get the blog entry completed and published, but we also needed to get the individual bars drying on the curing racks.

Another part of the day involved developing a new recipe for Alison's daughter. We want to try something for her using cocoa butter rather than Shea butter, and we now have a new recipe for that soap. You can probably see a bottle of grapeseed oil in the upper left corner of the photo below. We did not use it in today's soap, but we bought it today in anticipation of the cocoa butter soap. We will probably try it on Friday or early next week. More about that when we do it.

The third part of the day resulted in two loaves of soap, both of them are to fill orders that were recently placed with the additional happy result of having extra bars to take to the Wine Festival in November.

Today we made Sugared Spruce and Cool Waters soaps. We have made both before, but they were CP soaps. We don't want to wait 6 weeks for the soap, so we are making them HP today.

Sugared Spruce is from +Rustic Escentuals who says the fragrance oil "gives a pleasant woody aroma year round that is a perfect blend of greenery and sweetness. Sugared Spruce fragrance oil has notes of stately Blue Spruce, earthen moss, warm cedar wood, and balsam wood rounded out with a base of vanilla and caramel butter with sweet berry hints, cassis, and sugar crystals."

It really is a wonderful smell, and we love it. It is a great blend of masculine and sugar. Alison's son says he can smell the spruce in it, but it has a layer of sweetness, too.

The FO has a 1% vanillan content, and vanilla causes the soap to darken as it cures. We saw the CP soap darken quite a bit as it cured. We planned to add titanium dioxide to this batch of soap to counteract the vanilla and lighten the soap as much as possible.

For the colors, we mixed three different micas into a small amount of safflower oil.

Patina Sheen and Light Gold micas are both from +Bramble Berry,

and the Enchanted Forest Mica is from +Rustic Escentuals.

Today's other loaf of soap is Cool Water Type by +Natures Garden described by the NG Website as "a refreshing, spicy, lavender, ambery fragrance. This masculine scent possesses a blend of lavender, jasmine, oakmoss, musk and sandalwood."

We planned to swirl together a blue stripe with the TD portion of the soap

To create the blue stripe, we mixed Aqua Pearl and 1982 Blue Micas

both from +Bramble Berry in a small amount of safflower oil.

We wanted to add silk to the soap today, so we cut a

cotton ball size of silk into very tiny pieces.

Then we put the silk into the distilled water before mixing in the lye.

We added titanium dioxide into the oil mixture to keep the soap

as light as possible.

We then added the water/lye/silk mixture and mixed until

we brought the batter to a thick trace.

We cooked it for 30 minutes before removing the lid to stir,

then cooked it for another hour, stirring after every 15 minutes.

After 1 1/2 hours total cooking time, we used Ph strips to test the soap,

then we did the zap test, too. The soap was done. Yay!

In order to keep the two loaves as evenly portioned as possible, we first measured the entire amount of batter into measuring cups to be sure we had the same amount for each batch. Then we returned one portion back into the crock pot to keep it warm and soft while we prepared the first loaf.

Because we wanted a two-color swirl for the Cool Waters, we divided the batter into two portions.

Added 1/2 of the FO to this part

and the other 1/2 of the FO to the other part.

We then mixed the mica into one of the portions

and mixed until the color was evenly distributed.

We put the batter into the mold by plopping it in a spoonful at a time, alternating colors

after every spoonful or so. There was no magic plan for adding the two colors. We just tried to keep

it even and pleasing to our own eyes.

Once all of the batter was in the mold, we used a wooden skewer to swirl the colors together.

Then we tamped the soap down as tightly as possible and smoothed down the top.

Into the curing room it went to cool and harden for 24 hours.

Now on to the second loaf of soap - Sugared Spruce.

We had three mixing bowls lined up and ready.

We added the FO to the batter and mixed thoroughly.

Then we divided the batter into 4 portions. One part would stay in the crock pot and

have no additional colorant other than the TD we used at the beginning of the mix.

We divided three other portions into the mixing bowls.

We added the patina sheen to one bowl.

Enchanted Forest to another. And then the light gold mica to the fourth portion.

We got so busy mixing and trying to work fast before the batter cooled and hardened too much that we didn't get pictures of the light gold mica. None of the colors were as dark as we had wished, so we added additional Enchanted Forest and Light Gold micas directly to those batters and mixed evenly. It didn't really make that much of an improvement from what we could see, but sometimes the colors evolve and change as the batter cools and hardens. It will be interesting to see tomorrow how the colors end up.

We scraped the three colors in the measuring bowls back into the crock pot

and swirled all four colors together.

Putting the soap portions back into the crock pot serves a couple of purposes. For one, we get a great swirl and the crock pot has a lot of room to really stir and swirl. Another purpose, though, is that the crock pot is still very warm and it helps to warm back up the soap that has started to cool as we added colorants. Being warm and soft makes it go into the mold better and helps it form a better looking bar of soap.

When the colors were swirled to our satisfaction, we tilted the crock pot over and scraped the batter into the mold, tamping it down, and smoothing off the top.