Soap Lily: Out On a Limb For This Butterfly

#takingarisk #coldprocesssoap #butterflyswirl #patienceisatoughvirtue

Tuesday, January 13, 2014

First - notice the date above. That is the day we made the soap, and we waited to post the blog until we had some final pictures to show you. See how long it took?

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Kathy and I have been chasing butterflies. We may have managed to catch ourselves a few pretty ones, but we would really love to master the technique and see some consistent results.

For the past few days, our soap batter has gotten so thick! We've been brainstorming and conducting research and talking about it until we're seeing butterflies every time we close our eyes.

Could the batter be affected by the fragrance oils? Could the temperature be too warm when we mix the oils and the lye/water? Might we be mixing too long before we start coloring and swirling? ARGH!

I decided that nothing ventured was nothing gained, and since we are trying new things anyway, why not just really go for it and see what happens? In other words, today I made Kathy VERY nervous.

Neither one of us likes to waste our ingredients. If you are a soaper, then you know how dang expensive it can be to lose a batch of soap. Definitely NOT something you want to happen. We usually take the safe route and use recipes that we are pretty sure will work, and we use techniques that we have seen work or that we have successfully used ourselves.

My plan for today really put us out on a limb. Did we catch a butterfly? We still don't know. It has already been more than 24 hours and we still haven't been able to see for sure. The suspense is killing us! Did it work? Will we ever know? Let me take you back to the beginning of this batch:

Last April I had found a recipe on Lovinsoap.com that I used to try a funnel pour soap. It worked really well then, so I decided to try it again. We wanted a batter that would stay liquid for as long as possible so we would have time to work with our colors and perform the swirl. This recipe worked for a similar technique last year, why not now? I did need more batter than the original recipe called for, so I recalculated and ran it through soapcalc then Kathy and I were off and running.

This recipe calls for castor, avocado, coconut, olive, and safflower oils, and shea butter. The water percentage is rather high - 38%, and the lye concentration is around 27%. It has 5% superfat.

I probably should have just trusted the recipe since we have used it before, but no. I had to push it. So much of what Kathy and I have read revolved around having the oils and the lye/water at room temperature before mixing and only mixing to emulsify - not to trace. Usually we mix when the temperatures are around 90 degrees, but this time we waited until they were around 80 (no our room is not that warm, but we weren't comfortable letting it get any cooler than that). We also usually make sure to mix until we reach trace, but today I was determined not to. I wanted to see what would happen if we just mixed to emulsify.

I could tell that Kathy was really nervous about that because several times she said, "Just give the mixer another pulse. Just mix til the count of 5. I just don't know about this, Alison." And she may very well have been right. But I was stubborn and wanted to see.

We decided to use our much loved Tobacco & Bay Leaf fragrance. I often call the soap "Grandpa" when we make it with this FO because the smell reminds me of my Papa who was a carpenter and chewed tobacco, and we use colors that remind me of my other grandpa. Most men (and women, to be honest) love this fragrance.

Next we had to choose the colors for this butterfly swirl.

I wanted some colors to reflect the idea of tobacco and bay leaves, but we also wanted some pretty colors that would really pop in our butterflies' wings.

Above you can see the colors after we had mixed the micas and the titanium dioxide in oil. We added some Icicle Mica to the TD because we are such sparkle girls.

This recipe really makes a lot of soap. The total weight before it processes in the mold is 113.28 oz.

I stirred the lye/water mixture in with a spatula and then added the FO. I didn't use the stick blender until after I added the FO.

I stirred for a minute, then stick blended until the mix looked uniform. Kathy suggested that I give it a few more pulses because it just didn't look as creamy as the batter usually does. I gave it a few more pulses, but then stopped. I had turned this into a "trace" experiment. What will happen to the soap if we don't actually blend until we trace? We shall see...

We separated the batter into our measuring cups. It was VERY liquid. That IS what we were going for, but it was really quite liquidy (is that a word?). I was nervous, but I wouldn't dare admit it (stubborn, remember?).

The colors were gorgeous - as you can see in the following photos:

24 Karat Gold Mica

Denim Strut Mica

Black Mica

Enchanted Forest Mica

Titanium Dioxide with Icicle Mica

Wow. The base batter was soooo watery.

We added the colors and had no trouble at all with getting them to go deep into the base color.

They poured right in.

When we had added a few layers of each color, I used the hanger tool to do the "butterfly swirl".

There was definitely no problem today getting the hanger to move easily through the batter.

After swirling, we added a layer of the base batter. It did lay on top, and didn't sink into the other colors, but we had to layer it gently with a spatula.

There was so much batter from this recipe that we had to use another mold for the rest of it. Normally, we would build up the top of the soap, but given the very liquid nature of this batter, there was no way we could do that today.

We added the final bits of colored batter to the top of the soap...

as well as to the "extra" soap mold.

Then I swirled the colors together with a wooden skewer. In the large mold, I was careful to swirl only the top layers of colors because I didn't want to get into (what I hoped was) the butterfly swirl.

In the smaller mold, I just swirled the whole darn thing.

Above you can see the two molds just before we moved them to the curing box.

These were so watery that we had to walk very slowly and make no sudden movements. We didn't want to disturb the swirls by shaking them around. We insulated the curing box and left them overnight.

Early Wednesday morning, Kathy checked on the soap. When she touched it, the surface gave a little bit under her finger. Later in the morning when I arrived, we could still feel that the soap was jiggly like jello. We took it out of the box and put both molds up on the curing shelf. We can't even try to take it out of the mold yet.

Our fingers are crossed, and I have crossed my toes and my eyes as well. We are going to give this one several days to set up and then see what happens.

We'll keep you posted (keep your fingers crossed for me!).

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Thursday, 1-15-15

We took the soap out of the log mold, lifting it out by the freezer paper. We can tell by touching the sides that it is still way to soft to cut. But, hey! At least it isn't pure liquid anymore.

The smaller silicone mold shows some cracking around the edges on the top, but it is still too soft to take out of the mold.

We left both on the wire shelves in the curing room to harden some more.

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Friday, 1-16-15

Kathy checked it again this morning. It is still too soft to cut.

Patience is a tough virtue.

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Sunday, 1-18-15

I think it may almost be ready to cut! After a matinee performance at the community theater today, I went by Kathy's and found that it felt harder to the touch. The freezer paper still seemed to want to stick a little when I tried to peel it off, but I am optimistic that by the time I am back in the Soap Lily kitchen on Tuesday (one week after making the soap), we will be able to cut it!

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Tuesday, 1-20-15

Okay. It still isn't quite ready, but I am still not ready to call this experiment a failure. I think that for our purposes right now, it isn't working, because we are on a deadline for the challenge. If we were making the soap purely for our own artistic pleasure, then it would be fine. This batch is just taking longer to harden. I have been reading a LOT in the past few days and have come to the conclusion that this is just a slow hardening batch. Some, I've read, have taken 2 weeks to be ready to come out of the mold and then have to cure for another 4-6 weeks.

We put the "extra" mold into the freezer today to get it to turn loose from the silicone. It did and we cut it into small sample pieces. They really are pretty. We love the colors.

We also attempted to cut the larger mold into bars. We cut a few before we decided to wait a bit longer. The soap is still just too soft and we were afraid that we would squish our swirls. You can see below the few that we did cut. The rest went back on the curing rack (out of the mold) to harden for a while longer.