Can you apologize to a blog?

July 23, 2014

What can we say?  We are sorry that we've neglected the blog.  

So blog, we are sorry; we have excellent reasons why you have been neglected.

It's hard to blog while riding a bike, or sitting on the beach (Alison), and just as hard while filling in at your old job (Kathy).  Yes, we both spent all of last week doing other things. Lucky for Alison, she and her family were at Tybee Island. I didn't make it to a beach, but thankfully had a nice cool week to be working at a heating and air business.

This week started out with us catching up. We have a ton of soap that has cured in the last 10 days.  We spent Monday and Tuesday printing labels, doing cost sheets, checking out the great new fragrance oils and generally "getting back into gear".

Several weeks ago we participated in the annual yard sale/antique market at Homestead House (511 Grant St., Clarkesville) www.homesteadhouseprimitives.com  During the course of the day, owner Leigh Johnston asked us to create some "primitive" looking soap out of a few of her favorite scents.  We got busy and started making soap using the HP (hot process) method.  When we used color, we used muted tones for the scents she requested including  Kudzu, Honeysuckle, Honey Almond Oatmeal, and Lemongrass Mint.  Homestead House is located in an authentic 1700's log cabin. It is filled with goodies such as primitive furniture, period upholstery, and a variety of early American  merchandise.  They had to add on a "barn" section to hold it all.   

We delivered the soap to them, and now we have our fingers crossed that her customers will love it and we will get a reorder soon.

After all the paper work, deliveries, catching up, etc., we finally got down to making a re-batch of Grandpa soap.  The popularity of this soap caught us by surprise, or at least it caught me by surprise.  Alison loved it from the beginning. It has slowly grown on me, and the more we sell, the better I like it.  The scent is Tobacco and Bay leaf from +Bramble Berry, and it has a nice blend of scents that incorporate bay leaf and fir needle mingled with cedarwood and bergamot. Our customers love it!

Tobacco & Bay Leaf Scent

We are using the HP (hot process) method this time and hope to layer the same colors we used in the first CP (cold process) funnel poured batch we made. It looked like the photo below when we finished. 

Our first batch of CP Grandpa soap

We used a combination of micas and oxides for our colors.  The titianum dioxide is to lighten the batter, we know it won't be white, we just don't want it to be yellow.

Colors from +Bramble Berry, oxides and mica

Since we used the HP method, we melted all the oils (castor, avocado, coconut, olive, rice bran and shea butter) in the crock pot then added the lye/water.  

As we started blending, the batter was loose and very liquid.

After five minutes or so our batter was at light/medium trace. We put the lid on the crock pot and started cooking, checking the progress every fifteen minutes.

What the batter looked like when we had light/medium trace.

After the 1st fifteen minutes, as  you can see in the photo above, the soap was bubbling up (gelling) on the side, and the color had changed to off white.

A photograph doesn't show you how solid the batter is, but check out the spatula. Notice that it is sticking right out of the batter on it's own; the batter is that hard.

The batter is so stiff that the spatula pulled apart leaving the paddle in the batter and the handle, uh naked!  We used a stainless steel spoon and mixed up the batter, then set the timer for another 15 minutes.

We have mentioned the gel phase. If you look closely in this picture, you can see areas of the batter that are darker and kind of slick looking. This is what the batter looks like as it goes through gelling - a part of the saponification process - as the ingredients turn into soap.

Another term you have heard us mention is "mashed potato stage."  The picture above shows what that stage looks like.  At this point we are almost done, but to be on the safe side we let it cook another fifteen to thirty minutes.

The soap is done, zap test was ok, PH strips are ok, it's been cooking for about 1-1/2 hours. You can see the cooked soap on the inside edge of the crock.

We had added some titanium dioxide early in the process to give us a lighter batter. Now it's time to add our scent, divide the soap batter, and add colorants. We have to move quickly because as the soap cools it hardens, and it's not easy putting hard soap batter into a mold.

We used green, red and blue colorants as you can see in this picture. We weren't happy with the blue, so we added another (brighter) shade of blue. We aren't sure that it helped much, but hopefully you will be able to tell it's blue once it's cured.

We started with a layer of red, then covered it with blue.

After the blue layer we added a layer of white.

The last layer was green.  When we did the CP batch, we had several layers of each color, but because HP soap hardens so quickly we were only able to make one layer of each color.

Once we had all the soap in the mold we tamped it down several times to get rid of air bubbles. At this point we realized that we had forgotten to put in the outer dividers for the mold.  Rather than cry, we slid them down the sides and hoped for the best.  After tamping it a few more times for good luck we inserted the dividers.  

After the soap cured for 24 hours, we removed it from the mold. The final result looks and smells great! Although it's not as fancy as the funnel pour CP soap, it smells just as good and even the blue looks good.

We were really curious to see what they inside layers looked like, 

so we cut into one bar, and you can see the results below.

It isn't yellow, but a nice off-white, and yes, even the blue looks blue.

Grandpa scented HP soap bars weigh approximately 5 oz each and will be ready to use in a week.

We try an old favorite using Hot Process - gulp

Thursday July 10, 2014

Since we have a customer who wants several rustic soaps, we have been making soap using the HP method.  It's not as polished or as smooth as CP soap, but in this case it's just what the customer wants.  

One of the scents she requested is our Honey Almond Oatmeal soap.  In our soaping career we've made it twice, both times using CP.  Since we need it quickly, Alison and I took a huge leap of soaping faith and decided to try it using HP; surely the soaping gods would smile on us!

The oils for this soap are olive, coconut, sweet almond, avocado, and Castor.  As honey is in the name of the soap, we add several ounces of pure local honey thinned with water (so it will mix into the soap more easily and evenly). We also ground up some whole almonds with distilled water, then strained out the almond bits leaving just the liquid, thus creating our own almond milk. Both the honey and the almond milk are essential ingredients in the soap as well as colloidal oatmeal which we ground to a powder form and will add to the soap for exfoliation.

The original recipe called for Clove Bud, Sweet Orange and Eucalyptus EO's; however, due to an extremely low flash point for the sweet orange, we can't use it for HP soaping.  We also discovered - oops - we were pretty much out of clove bud oil.  Being resourceful, we decided to make this batch using the remaining clove bud oil (about a half teaspoon) mixed with our Oatmeal and Honey FO (which has a pleasant almond scent), for good measure we added a touch of eucalyptus oil.  

We started out melting the oils in the crock pot then slowly mixed the lye/water in.  Since the honey/water will add extra heat from the sugar during the saponification process, we have to add it in slowly and not use the stick blender right off the bat.

Batter before we started mixing with stick blender. So far we had only used a spoon, no emulsification yet.

 You can see the color is changing once we used the stick blender. At this point we have all the oils, honey water, almond milk, and oatmeal blended in.

After the first fifteen minutes we took off the lid and found this (above)!  The oils had separated and the batter didn't look very good at all. We mixed like crazy to get the batter back together.  At this point we had our doubts.

After the second fifteen minutes we were dismayed to see this. Ugh! The soap batter didn't look like anything we'd seen before, so we just kept on mixing, and mixing, and mixing (oh, our fingers were crossed, not sure if it will help).

After an hour we could smell oatmeal cooking and the soap looked a little better. It was not quite what we are used to, but it wasn't separating quite so much either. We did not uncross our fingers yet.

You can't see the actual bubbles, but take our word for it, the batter was bubbling around the outer edges. Yep, fingers still crossed!

Finally, after almost two hours the soap was holding together, and we could see cooked soap on the inside of the crock. I think we finally uncrossed our fingers at this point...things were looking up.

After more stirring and a few prayers, we started using PH strips.  The one on the far right is the first one; it's really blue (not good). The middle one and the left are the last two we did; the color is right but we did the zap test just to be sure.  

No zap, it tasted like soap, looked like soap, and even smelled like soap.  We added our scents and mixed them in.

Once the scents were completely blended we put the soap into the mold over a layer of bubble wrap for a "honeycomb" effect on the surface of the soap. 

We used the "spoon and plop" method - very scientific! Once we had all the soap in the mold, we tamped it several times (quite forcefully) to get rid of air bubbles.

Once again our lovely hand model Alison began cleaning up and noticed the smooth, creamy lather we had from the finished soap.

  We tried putting the bubble wrap on the top of the soap but the soap was still too warm to be between two layers of plastic, so we scrapped that idea and will leave the bottom as our "honeycomb".  We put the dividers into the mold and set it aside to cure overnight; we will unmold it on Friday.

Our Honey Almond Oatmeal soap. It smells great.

Our "honeycomb" effect on the bottom.  If you look very closely you can see where we tried putting the bubble wrap on the top, use your imagination.

We feel our crossed fingers really helped this soap. Actually, the constant stirring didn't hurt either.  It's quite nice and smells great, and if you look closely you can see the oatmeal.

Each bar of Honey Almond Oatmeal soap weighs about 5 ounces, and 

they will be ready in a week.

We've been busy, you just can't see it

July 9, 2014 Wednesday

Honestly, we didn't drop off the face of the earth, the first half of this week we have been playing catch up on our dull, but necessary paperwork.  Alison and I have been reviewing the last three or four weeks of our soap making, we were way behind on figuring our cost calculations, wrapping the bars of soap, and making the labels for them.  While working the cost calculations we discovered the sad fact that if we don't make notations when we make soap, we have a hard time remembering exactly what lye we used, or where the Castor oil came from etc.  

It may sound unimportant, but when we try to figure out exactly how much money we have in a bar of soap, origin and cost of ingredients is critical.  As you know if you've read this blog very long, we search high and low for the quality ingredients we need at the lowest prices. It makes us crazy as there is so much out there, but our costs have consistently come down as a direct result of our shopping savvy, i.e. it pays off.

Today we printed off the last of the labels for soaps that are cured or will be soon, chose fabrics with which to wrap the soap, and finished our cost calculations - all of which made us very happy.  Since we finished all the "paper work" fairly early in the day, we decided to tackle something we both are anxious to try - Bug-Be-Gone soap!

Yes, Bug-Be-Gone. It is made up of the following EO (essential oils):  citronella, lemongrass, orange, eucalyptus and litsea cubeba - plus we added tea tree oil as an extra bug-zapping bonus.  According to the Lebermuth Co where we purchased the Bug-Be-Gone, "These EO's effectively discourage those unwanted flies and mosquitoes when added to soaps, sprays, lotions or candles".

Everything we've been able to find about bug repellent soap or lotion recipes list those ingredients in some combination or another.  We've made the Bug-Be-Gone candles, and they seemed to help keep the mosquitoes off our porches, so without further ado we delve into what we hope will be a soap that when used, will leave a scent on the skin that bugs do not like...that's the idea anyway. 

Since we want to use the soap ASAP, we decided to use the HP (hot process) method, it can cure for a week then we will be our own guinea pigs and report back as to how effective it is.

The recipe we used comes from Soap Making Resource. It was originally designed as a CP (cold process) recipe,  however we easily changed his scents and made it using HP (hot process). We used olive, sweet almond, coconut, sustainable palm, palm kernel and Castor oils with the Bug-Be-Gone essential oil blend and Tree Tree oil.  

The main consideration when using the HP method is to know the flash point of the fragrance or essential oils.  You can see in the picture above that the flash point for the BBG oil is 70 degrees C, which is close to 160 degrees F.  We just had to be sure that the soap was below that temperature before adding the essential oils.

We didn't take many pictures of the actual soap making process. Basically  we mixed our oils in the crock pot, added the lye/water, stick blended it to a medium trace and put the lid on it.

We checked the progress every fifteen minutes, and after about one and a half hours we checked the PH and did a zap test.  No zap, just the taste of soap, so we declared Bug-Be-Gone soap done.  

We put the soap into the log mold, let it sit overnight and cut it on Thursday.

The soap smells nice; you can pick up most of the EO scents that are in the BBG oil.  While we were washing out the crock pot Alison modeled the lather. It was soft, and soaped very nicely, leaving a slight (not overpowering) smell on her hands.

Our lovely hand model Alison demonstrating Bug-Be-Gone's lather.

We cut the BBG soap Thursday, it was a little soft, but after a week in the curing room it will no doubt harden up.  

Not much of a change from what it looked like yesterday.

The lighting wasn't great in this picture, the soap is actually a very light cream color.

Bug-Be-Gone soap. It will be ready in a week!

All the bars are one inch thick and weigh about five ounces.

Spearmint and Lemongrass Hot Process that could have been a hot mess...

Wednesday July 2, 2014

One of our customers has requested several "rustic" looking soaps to sell in her store.   One of the scents she chose was spearmint and lemongrass, so today Alison and I will use the HP (hot process) method to make this soap.

We used spearmint and lemongrass essential oils for this soap.  As we measured the amounts (heavier on the mint) we realized that the flash point on the spearmint was pretty low.  The soap would have to cool down before we add the scents or the essential oils will "flash off," or, disappear.

Alison reworked the recipe to double its size while I was getting all the ingredients together.  We picked fresh spearmint and made a mint tea to add to the water we will mix with the lye.  Once the tea had steeped for a while and was still fairly warm we weighed it, then added enough distilled water to get the correct amount for this recipe.

We do our lye mixing in the laundry room; it's completely separate from the workroom/kitchen, so it's out of our way while it is cooling.  Today as we added the tea/water to the lye it got a little weird, and we learned a good lesson.

We did a little Internet research to see if what we experienced was unique to us (which wouldn't have surprised us), and we learned that it's not a great idea to mix lye into liquid that is not cool.  

What the tea water looked like.

After I poured all the lye into the water, I began stirring (I had my goggles, gloves and an apron on) , but each time I moved the spatchula the liquid around it boiled up and kind of sizzled.  Hmmm, this had never happened before, so I yelled for Alison to come and look.  

She said the same thing I had said, "Hmmmm, this is weird." It was also a little frightening. 

After a quick discussion, muffled behind towels we held over our noses and mouths, we decided to very slowly continue mixing the lye.  It still sizzled and bubbled each time we stirred, but eventually the lye completely dissolved without any disasters. 

We learned that it was because the water was still too warm.  It did not affect the soap at all. The only danger would have been to us if the lye mixture had boiled out onto our skin.  We are fine, though, as is the soap.

The oils and butters this recipe called for.

Since this batch was a duplicate of one we had made earlier using the CP (cold process) method we used the following variety of oils:   olive, palm, sunflower, rice bran, sweet almond, coconut, and shea butter.  We mixed some titanium dioxide in sunflower oil so there would be a lighter color in part of the soap.  The finely ground mint leaves were mixed with sunflower oil which would give us a slightly green color as well as an exfoliant.

The shea butter took the longest to melt, even with the crock pot on high.

To begin with the batter was very loose and runny, this picture is right before we began stick blending.

You can see it's very much a liquid at the start.

After a few minutes of blending, the batter began to thicken. At this point we didn't even have a light trace yet; the batter was still too wet.

About 5 minutes or so of stick blending brought us to light trace. If you look carefully, you can see the drips on top of the surface of the batter.  We were making progress but wanted  the mixture to be thicker.

After about 10 minutes of on and off blending and hand stirring we were at a good medium trace.  It was time to put the lid on the crock and let it cook.

 We checked the batter every fifteen minutes. This is the first time we checked it.  You can't see it in the picture, but the soap is changing; there is a little gel forming on the edges.

This is actually how thick it gets at this point in the cooking; we stirred it up to make sure it was cooking uniformly.

In the upper portion of the picture, you can clearly see the soap gelling; this is one of the cook stages we look for. We stirred it again and put the lid back on for another fifteen minutes of cooking.

After approximately one and a half hours we did a PH strip test, and the colors seemed to be within the range we were looking for, but we still feel the need to test the batter ourselves.  We resorted to the "zap" test; Alison and I both tasted the soap.  We weren't zapped and only tasted soap.  Time to add the TD and the mint mixtures.   

We removed about one-third of the soap into a separate measuring cup and added the mint. 

The TD went into the soap remaining in the crock.

The mint mixture cooled down faster because it was out of that ceramic crock.Wwe added part of the mixed scents to this portion of the batter with no problems.

Even though we had removed the crock from the heating element, it was still very hot; it took about fifteen minutes of stirring to get it cool enough to add the essential oils.

Once we were able to add the essential oils to the white portion, we added the green back to the white and gently swirled it in the pot.

The soap was cooing rapidly, so we moved quickly and filled the mold.  

The soap was stiff  but still workable and had just the right coloration.

Here is the soap in the mold. 

We will let it sit overnight then remove it.

Thursday morning it was a little lighter and smelled great.

As I cleaned up the bits and pieces I began washing my hands, here is what the lather looked like.  I wish you could smell it. The soap is very minty with a smidge of lemon.

Three random bars.

 They are a great size and fit the hand quite well.

Spearmint and Lemongrass HP soap;

 it will be ready to use in a week.