Vacation for your skin

#lanolin #lanolinsoap #hotprocesssoap #handmadesoap

I'm almost a week late posting this blog entry, but I sure did have a wonderful Thanksgiving spending time with my family.  We hope you had a fun holiday, too!

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

I'm always eager to try new things, especially if the result could be beneficial for someone I care about.  I have been reading about lanolin lately, and how protective and moisturizing it is for the skin.  I was so excited by what I read that I went ahead and ordered some so I could make a lanolin soap.

Kathy and I have close family members who have sensitive skin or eczema battles to fight, so we often think about them when we try out a new recipe.

As I planned for the lanolin soap, I watched YouTube videos,  and I read many blogs, skin care reports, and personal anecdotes and comments. I looked for anything referring to lanolin in the small soaping library that Kathy and I have started (just a half dozen books or so - but it's a shelf dedicated to soap making). When I looked through the books, I found several warnings about using lanolin with people who tend toward allergies.  Lanolin comes from sheep's wool, so if one is allergic to wool, he or she might react to lanolin.  Hmmm... The person I had in mind for this soap is very sensitive and highly allergic to several things.

I tend to have very sensitive skin, so I started with myself.  I rubbed the lanolin all over one hand (but not both so I could compare them) and waited.  After 20 minutes - nothing.  A couple of hours - still nothing.  So far so good, and I proceeded to work on a recipe.  In the meantime, I had the allergic family member rub some into her hand.  She did not react either, so I continued to tweak and plan my recipe.

I settled on a blend of oils that includes grapeseed, palm, palm kernal, coconut, castor, and olive oils. I did also include the lanolin, but I wanted to be sure that it would be the "superfat" part of my soap. If lanolin's properties are so protective, moisturizing, and helpful, I wanted to be sure that it would truly be an asset in our soap.  I didn't want to take a chance on its helpful qualities being broken down during saponification, so I decided to add the lanolin after the cook.  It makes sense to me, but am I nuts?

I ran my recipe through the lye calculator at soapcalc and set it for 0% superfat so my lye would completely bind with all of the oils in the recipe, then I figured out how much lanolin would create a 5% superfat.  

Lanolin does not smell fantastic, and it will not make your soap smell fantastic.  It doesn't stink in the way that other things do, but it doesn't add a good smell to the soap.  For many people, if it doesn't smell good, then they just won't use it, which leads to the next question: 

fragrance or not?

People who are sensitive and allergic often do much better with unscented soaps and detergents. While that is very true, I still decided to go ahead and scent this batch.  We had two bottles of one of my favorite fragrances, Coconut Lime Verbena.  This is typed after the Bath & Body Works scent according to fragrance buddy.

The recipe I developed isn't as large as the batches Kathy and I usually make, 

so I was hoping that 2 oz of FO would be enough.  However, because I knew that the 

lanolin has its own aroma, my daughter assisted in creating a fragrance blend that we liked 

just in case we needed more than 2 oz of FO for the soap.  

We settled on an FO called Bora Bora from +Rustic Escentuals.  They describe Bora Bora as a blending of "sweet pineapple, acai berry, mango zest, tart passion fruit, yuzu zest, green apple, orchid leaves, and musky nuances."  Let me tell you, it is a wonderful FO all on its own, but mixed with Coconut Lime Verbena, it is heaven.

Pictured above are the two skin nurturing additives for this 

lanolin soap - lanolin from +Natures Garden  and Vitamin E.

Above you can see the soap after 30 minutes of cooking in the crock on low.

Because I am impatient and wanted to be able to use the soap soon, I decided to do this soap using the hot process method.  As often happens when experimenting, I had to be ready for anything (and that's how I like it!).

Usually, hot process soap begins to look like mashed potatoes when it is done.  This soap never did!  It kept looking like it was still in the gel phase.  I used Ph test strips and zap tested several times, and kept second-guessing myself.  Because I had figured the lye at 0% superfat, I was really worried that I wouldn't properly let all of the lye process and cook out of the soap.  I ended up letting the soap cook for much longer than usual.  Much longer.

I finally decided that the soap was as done as it was going to get, so my daughter and I moved on with finishing the soap.  We were working on the Fruit Loop Soap the same day, so we left the Fruit Loop soap in its crock pot to stay warm until we could finish our lanolin soap.

First we added a tsp. of Vitamin E oil and mixed well.

Then we added the lanolin.  Here is where it got interesting!   

When I began mixing in the lanolin, the soap immediately began to look like 

the mashed potato stage that I was looking for!

 I guess the superfat is what helps to create the fluffy "mashed potato" soap batter.

The batter was so hot that it didn't take long for the 

lanolin to melt, and I mixed until it was completely and evenly incorporated.

There was a distinct lanolin smell to the soap, so we mixed in our 2 oz of Coconut Lime Verbena FO.  Oh MY GOODNESS!  I really love that scent.  I could still smell the lanolin, though.  My daughter didn't think it was as strong as I did, so maybe I just had it on my hands, but we decided to go ahead and add 1/2 oz of Bora Bora to the batter as well.  Ahhh...HEAVEN!

  

We next added a couple of colors.  While the soap was cooking we had mixed Enchanted Forest Green and Light Gold Mica in small amounts of safflower oil.  

When the FO's were completely mixed in, we created two small "wells" in the batter.  Into one we poured the green, and into the other we poured the gold.

We quickly did an in the pot swirl, gently folding and stirring to create a swirling green and gold design.

Finally we put the batter into a 10" silicone mold, and then put the left over batter into the butterfly and bumblebee silicone mold.  

The small mound that you see on top of the yellow mold is the leftover soap that 

we scraped from the sides of the crock pot.  My daughter 

has already been using it and she LOVES it.

After the soap cooled and hardened for 24 hours, Kathy sliced it into bars for us and emailed the pictures.  It looks just as great as we had envisioned it!

We will let it cure for a week and the Lanolin Vacation will be ready.

Loopy for Fruit Loops

#fruitloops #hotprocesssoap #smellsjustlikefrootloops

Monday, November 24, 2014

Several months ago when Kathy and I placed an order for some fragrance oils, my daughter saw one that she was just dying to try.  She even came up with an idea for the kind of soap she thought would be great using this fragrance oil.  Well, since the kiddos are out of school this week for the Thanksgiving holiday, and Kathy is filling in at her old job, we thought that this would be the perfect time to go for it as her plan would take at least two days.

She wanted to make little loops that were the colors in Froot Loops cereal, and then make white soap to look like the milk in the cereal bowl.  We had to start with the colors first, so we made them on Monday.

Here we go!

We purchased this oil from fragrancebuddy.com but I'm not 

going to give you their description of the fragrance.  It smells

JUST LIKE Froot Loops. 

These are the colors we chose:  a mixture of Brick Red Oxide and Toffeelicious Mica

for the red color, Tangerine Wow! for the orange, Fizzy Lemonade Mica for the yellow,

Green Chrome Oxide for the green, 1982 Blue Mica for the blue, and Amethyst

Purple Mica for the purple color.  The Toffee Mica is from +Rustic Escentuals, and 

all of the other colors are from +Bramble Berry. 

We mixed a 1/2 teaspoon of colorant in 1/2 tablespoon (aka 1-1/2 tsp.) of 

safflower oil for each color.  Because we used 2 colors for the red, 

we used 1/4 tsp each of the red colors.

We want to use these soaps for Christmas, so we made this using the hot process method.  I think that we might get a result closer to what she envisioned if we used the cold process method, but there just isn't enough cure time between Thanksgiving and Christmas. (We really like how they came out anyway!)

Kathy and I have posted so many pictures of our HP method, that I won't bore you with those today. I'm thinking that the colors are more interesting than the cook with this project. 

We made 1/2 of our usual batch of soap, and when it was done 

we mixed in 1 oz of fragrance oil.

While the soap was cooking, we got our pans lined and ready to go.

This was an act of creativity and patience.  We needed something for each of 6 different colors, and it needed to be shallow enough to cut out little dots. 

 I had one small toaster oven pan, and my mom had one plus a larger pan.  We made two liners from a small pan and then placed both liners into the larger pan.  That is what you see in the lower portion of the above photo.  That made 4, but we still needed 2 more.  We found one shallow pan in Kathy's cabinet and since we would be lining the pan and the lye would be cooked out of the soap, we didn't think she would mind.  Finally, we found a plastic storage box that we thought would make a good mold.

**Side note - we tested this idea a few months ago with a different plan in mind.  We bought a few lengths of pvc pipe thinking that we could pour the soap batter into the pipe, let it harden, push it out, and then just cut the round soap into slices.  When we tried it with a CP soap, we finally got the soap out (I think we ended up freezing it for a little while) by using a smaller dowel rod to push it out one end of the PVC pipe.  It was actually very hard to do.  I think the pipe was really a bit too small, but we decided to try a different approach this time - especially since we were doing HP and wouldn't be able to pour a thin batter into a small pipe.

But back to today's project:

When the soap was done, we were working so fast to color and pour six different colors before the soap hardened that we really didn't take many pictures.  My apologies.

Above you can see my daughter spreading out the orange soap.

We took about 3/4 cup of batter (leaving the rest in the crock pot to stay

warm until we were ready for it), colored it, then poured it into the mold.

Finally, we placed a piece of plastic wrap over it and used a rolling

pin to be sure the soap was as flat and even as possible.

Above you can see all six colors poured

and smoothed out.

And below are two shots that are a bit more close up.

   

Because this was a hot process soap, and because we spread them out rather thinly, the soap cooled and hardened quickly.  Quickly enough for my daughter to start cutting out circles while I washed and cleaned up all of the dishes.

She cut circles until her fingers were sore.  At one point, my son popped in from wrestling practice and kindly gave her a hand cutting out the colorful dots.

Lots of dots

Really. Tons of dots! (Well, it felt like tons.)

We hated to waste all of the soap that was left over after cutting out the dots,

so we decided to use it.  

We put the four darker colors back into the crock pot, 

added a little distilled water, and heated the soap back up until it was soft.  

We then pressed the soap into cute little gingerbread man molds.

And this is how they looked when we took them out of the

mold the next day.

We knew that the darker colors would overpower the light ones, so we decided to hold back the orange and yellow scraps to melt down separately on Tuesday.  We placed those into cute little ladybug molds.  No pictures.  Sorry.  But take our word for it.  They really are cute.

Our time was up, and we had to go, so we left part II of the project for Tuesday.

******************************************************

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Fruit Loops Part II

Tuesday we were ready to make the "milk" portion of our fruit loops and milk soap.  We knew that the FO had some vanilla content to it, so to keep it as milky white as possible, we needed to add some TD.  We also wanted it to have a little depth, so we included some diamond dust mica from +Natures Garden as well.

Combining the TD and the diamond dust in 1 TBL of oil

I just like this photo.  When we added the TD/Diamond mixture to the oils

it looked a bit like a jellyfish swimming around in there.  

We added the lye/water and mixed them together.

When we reached a thick trace, we put the lid on and let it cook.

We usually begin HP soap by letting it cook for 30 minutes before we stir it.

It was really puffing up, so we stirred it about 3 minutes early.  I didn't want to take a chance on

it coming up out of the pot.  After this, we stirred every 15 minutes until it had cooked for 1-1/2 hours.  It actually stayed in the pot on warm for a little while once it was done because we were doing two projects at once, and we had to finish what we were doing with the other before we could get back to this one.  In the midst of all of this, my daughter asked me, "Hey! Can we make candles, too?"  My head almost exploded at the thought of adding that project to what we were already doing.  Kathy would probably revel in so many things at once, but I put the candles off until another day.

We added 3 oz of FO to the cooked soap, and

stirred briskly to incorporate the fragrance completely.

While the soap was cooking, my daughter had gotten the cups ready to go.  She wanted 

her soap to look like little bowls of cereal and milk, so we used silicone cupcake

cups.  In each of the cups, she sprinkled a few of the colored dots that we had made on Monday.

We then put white soap batter into each cup, and used a wooden skewer to mix it with the dots that were in the bottom of the cups.  We pressed more dots into the white batter, then added a bit more white batter on top of that.  Finally, Emma pressed a few dots of each color into the top of each cup.

It took us a little while to get our technique down, but I think we did pretty well!  Our concern was that the dots wouldn't embed well enough and once we remove the soap from the silicone cups they could just fall out.  We made sure to press them in very well, so our fingers are crossed that our worry is unnecessary.

We had more batter than we did silicone cups, so we used the left over white batter and dots to make a loaf of Fruit Loop soap.  We followed the same process as the cups.  We had some dots on the bottom of the loaf mold, added white batter, added more dots, added more batter, and then pressed more dots into the top of the soap.

We really love the colorful effect, and the smell is so wonderful 

that we have to remind ourselves that we can't really eat it.

Closeup of the loaf mold.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Kathy cut the loaf into slices for me and sent us the pictures.  Wow!  It really looks festive, and Emma is tickled with how her idea came out.  We haven't removed the silicone cups yet, and won't be back in the Soap Kitchen until next week, so I decided not to wait for pictures of the cups. 

We will let it cure for a week, and then have a fun soap to add to our variety.

Spicy Tea

#IndianSpiceTea #hotprocesssoap #homemadesoap

#tryingnewthings

     (Note from Kathy:  As you read this blog entry you might notice the word "we" is used quite a bit.  Actually it should be "I" as Alison is the only Lily working in the soap kitchen this week.  I am subbing at my old job until next Wednesday and Alison is carrying the whole Soap Lily load - so I wanted to say thanks and give her props for being the functioning Lily for the next few days.)



Wednesday, November 19, 2014

In our continuing effort to experiment with natural, healthy ingredients, today we made a test batch of soap using a loose tea from Roots 'N Remedies.  The tea is called Indian Spice, and the fragrance - even before brewing - is truly out of this world.  We used distilled water and brewed the tea at double strength the night before.  Brewing it ahead of time gives the tea plenty of time to cool down before time to add the lye.

Pictured above is the loose tea in the baggie and the brewed tea in the bowl.

  Usually the chemical reaction of the lye to distilled water creates fumes that can be quite horrid, and are in fact harmful if we breathe them (while mixing we breathe through a soft cloth to filter out the fumes).  When we use other liquids, (wine, tea, milk etc) we never know what kind of smell we will get from the chemical reaction.  

Today, however, was different.  Interestingly, the smell of the lye mixed with this tea was not terrible.  The usual lye smell was there, but we could also detect a nice layer as well, almost like an apple cider or apple cider vinegar.  

The color of the tea/lye mixture was also nicer today.  In the following several photos, you can see the change in the tea as we added the lye.  It changed, but it became a deeper, more beautiful color - not at all like the change we saw when we used Mango Green tea a few days ago.

First few bits of lye are going into the tea

Now more of the lye.  See the beautiful color?

And after it had cooled a bit, the color was an even richer

golden, mustard color.

Above you can see the oils in the tiny tester crock, 

and the Indian Spice Tea/Lye mixture in the bowl.

Slowly adding the tea/lye to the oils

This crock is the perfect size for our test batches!

Notice the difference in the color before stick blending...

and after, it had turned into a soft beige color.

We mixed until we reached a thick trace.  It actually looked like

a very thick vanilla pudding.  At that point, we put the lid on  and let it cook for 30 minutes.

This is how it looked after 30 minutes.

It cooked for a total of 1 1/2 hours.

See how it sticks to the side of the crock at this point?  This is a sign that the soap is probably done.

To be sure it's done we used a PH strip and zap test.

The soap was done, and we were ready to put it into the mold.

At this point we noticed there actually was a bit of a fragrance to the soap.  This is unusual because in our experience between the lye and the saponification process, the smell of the original ingredients is usually lost.  Even with something like wine, the smell just doesn't survive saponification.  There must be something about this Indian Spice tea, though, because we could smell a bit of it!

Since the smell did survive the cooking process, it makes us cautious about the strength of the herbs in the tea.  Sometimes spices or herbs can be rough on sensitive skin.  When we try out these soaps we will need to pay close attention to how our skin feels before, during, and after washing with it. 

Even though there was a hint of fragrance, we still wanted to use a fragrance oil in 1/2 of the batch for testing purposes.  You know, we want to be, like, all scientific and stuff.  So, we measured the total amount of the batter, then divided it in half, putting half back into the crock pot momentarily.

We put the other 1/2 of the batch into eight squares of our tester size mold.  Then we got ready to add fragrance to the other 1/2.

For the Indian Spice Tea soap, we decided on an FO from +Natures Garden  called Chai Tea.  According to their website, the "fragrance begins with top notes of spicy cinnamon bark and nutmeg; followed with a body of fresh green tea; finished off with the aroma of creamy soy milk."  It is absolutely fabulous!  We want to use it again.

We did have to take care with it, however.  The safety data for this oil indicates that it should only be used at a rate of 1% in soaps, bath oils, or bath gels.  For perspective, in our regular five pound batches of soap, we generally add around 3.30 oz of fragrance oil.  With this FO, we would only be able to add .66 oz to a full batch of soap (not even a whole ounce!).

So, we whipped out our old math skills and figured out 1% of the total ounces of oils used in this soap, then we divided that in half because we only added fragrance to 1/2 of the batter.  It did not add up to very much FO, but even at such a small amount, it still smelled so good.  We really do need to make something else with this FO.  It will be interesting to see how such a low rate of usage will work in a whole batch of soap.

Above is the FO added to the remaining 1/2 of the batter.

And this shows both versions of the test soap in the mold.  The left side has no fragrance added

 and the Chai Tea scented is on the right.  We put the mold into the curing 

room to cool and harden for 24 hours.

Thursday, November 20, 2014

The soap is ready to come out of the mold.  We can't see any visible difference between the scented and the "no-added scent" versions.  Can you?

Unscented

Chai Tea scented

Unscented on left and scented on right

These will be ready for our customer to try in about a week.