Diary of a Soapmaker

Apparently, back in October, my friend -- who generously lets me mooch web hosting for ziggurat off of him -- upgraded Apache, the web server software, and it changed a bunch of defaults. Including the ability to follow symbolic links -- the magic that lets me make a short, memorable URI such as http://ziggurat.org/soap/suppliers/ go to the right place (which is actually nested down a few more layers, thanks to the software that runs it).

In short, since October 2, 2004, the Suppliers Page link that has been a published resource since 1998 was ... totally broken. ARGH!

And now that I've got that fixed... the stupid Links software is apparently not recognizing any of my alternate-category assignments in the Links Database. So some of the categories, like Colorants, that should have like 50 links in them, have ... oh, two or three.

!!!!!!!!! Computers *so* suck. I swear to you.

So I just got back from vacation on Saturday, and Sunday I decided I wanted to make some soap.

I haven't quite managed it yet, but I'm working on it.

Sunday I got some buffalo tallow out of the freezer -- first time I've worked with it, but someone gave it to me, and it's been sitting in my freezer for a year, so I might as well start using it up -- I've also got wild boar and deer tallow in there as well, at least six pounds or so in total -- and put it in a pot to come to room temperature.

Slacked the rest of the day.

Monday, ended up going out for dinner + drinks with friends, so also didn't get soap made.

Tuesday I had to do laundry -- I mean I was into the desperate sort of "grab the dusty shirt that hasn't been moved in the closet for six months" point, having not yet done my vacation laundry -- so I thought I would make soap. Measured all my oils, heated them together. Measured my water out in two parts, as I wanted to make goatsmilk soap and since I didn't have any fresh milk, I was going to have to reconstitute powdered goatsmilk. And then came the painful reality of apartment life: I can't make lye solution in my apartment. There's nowhere for the fumes to go. So I have to go outside. And since I don't have a balcony and our rooftop access has been revoked, that means going down in the elevator to the back alley. And this means a whole big change of my entire lye routine -- I can't use my rubbermaid pitcher I've been using for six years anymore, because it doesn't have a lid, and I can't take a strong solution of sodium hydroxide out where I might meet other people, or in an elevator which might get stuck or jerk around or anything, in a container without a lid. So I found a half-gallon hdpe plastic jar with a lid that I wasn't using, and put my water in that instead. Then I put that jar, my gloves, lye spoon, eye protection, and silk fibres in a paper bag to take downstairs with me.

Measured my lye, which was a bit of an adventure. The lye pellets were completely staticky, which I didn't notice until I went to pick up the little container and the pellets jumped away from my hand -- out of the container, onto the counter and the sink. So I had a spontaneous little cleaning session, as I dumped out the cats' food dishes and put them in the dishwasher, then wiped up the floor and counter with a wet rag to catch any other pellets, then washed everything else off. That was annoying, but at least it didn't put me behind laundry schedule because the laundry room was completely in use and I hadn't been able to put my stuff in the washers yet anyways.

Finally, I took the lye-solution-making kit downstairs, along with my laundry, put the laundry in to wash, and went out back to make lye solution. Ended up only being able to dissolve half the lye, because it was really hot and not cooling particularly quickly because it was warm out, and I had to sit there to babysit it because I can't just leave it out there unattended, and really, hanging out on my building's loading dock is not as much fun as it seems -- even though i brought a book out, the light was dim and it was hard to read.

So I ended up giving up for the evening, put the lid on my lye solution, took everything back upstairs, and put the lye solution in the fridge.

I think I'm going to try and finish it up tonight. The weak lye solution ("weak"; it's only about 30%) will be nice and cold, and i might bring down some ice cubes to toss in too, to keep it from getting really hot. The oils are already measured, although I'll have to warm them up again.

man, I wish we had rooftop access.

Here are a couple photos of the vanilla pear swirl soap, right after i cut it. I have pictures of the uncut log of soap, but they weren't very impressive so I didn't bother to clean them up to post them. :)







i'll post some more, as the vanilla starts to discolor and it looks interesting. well, hopefully it'll look interesting. :)

Ok, so I'm moving soon, so I wanted to make one last batch of soap before I pack up all the gear and put it away. I have a bunch of deer and bison tallow that I got at last year's Ohio-Kentuckiana Gathering and hadn't tried yet, so I decided to use a pound of the deer tallow in this batch. I've used deer tallow soap before, and it's very silky. This is only the second non-vegetarian batch of soap I've ever made (my first batch was a lard base, which I didn't actually like all that much. Good thing I'm stubborn. :-)

So, here's the recipe:

16 oz. deer tallow
16 oz. grapeseed oil
8 oz. coconut oil
2 oz. avocado oil
8 oz. olive oil

10 oz. cold water
7 oz. NaOH
1 oz. sodium lactate
Pinch silk

1.6 oz powdered goatsmilk
3 oz. cold water

2.4 oz. Sweetcakes Vanilla Pear FO
1 T. gold mica
1/2 T jade mica

--
Melt oils together and let cool to just above room temperature. Add gold mica.
Dissolve NaOH in cold water, add silk. When silk is dissolved, add sodium lactate. Let cool to just above room temperature.
Mix water into goatsmilk powder slowly (to prevent lumps). Put in freezer to turn slushy.
When oils and lye are cool, and goatsmilk is slushy, combine the goatsmilk into the lye, and mix the lye into the oils.
at a light trace, separate about half the traced soap into another bowl, and about half a cup into a mixing cup. first, mix the jade mica into the mixing bowl soap, so that you have a tiny amount of intensely green soap. then into the second bowl, add the FO slowly to avoid trace accelleration. when trace is thick pudding, dump the soap from the first container in along the side of the second bowl -- do not mix! then dump the green soap in the middle of the bowl. pour this into your mold. if it all works out right, you'll end up with a cream and brown swirled soap with veins of green mica throughout.

now, in practice, i'm not sure if this is going to work out right. the unfragranced (cream) half of the main soap was certainly a pudding trace, but adding the FO knocked the other half down to a light trace, even after i hit it with the stick blender. and the green soap was very thick, so i'm not sure how it'll turn out -- in the middle of the log, there's definitely a lot of it in one section.

put the pot and bowl in my oven overnight to warm/saponify, so they'll be soapy and easy to wash today... of course that had the side effect of making my kitchen smell fabulous, like vanilla pear. :) you know, the pilot light is the great unsung hero of home fragrancing...

we'll see how it turns out. i'll post photos if it looks at all interesting!

made some soap the other day but rather than repeat that post, i'll just link to it!

=>  ow, but a magnificent save that no one but kcraigs will appreciate

steph has the peppermint buzz soaps -- which turned out all right, if a little soft, i think due to not getting enough water cooked out of them -- and the other four batches are curing.

had an unfortunate and unintended result with the bitter almond batch: they were so soft when i unmolded them, i thought i would put them in the oven and let the heat gently evaporate some of the water. so i turned the oven on to 200°F for five minutes, then turned it off, and put the beautiful, nice, neat bars of soap in, on a cookie sheet lined with waxed paper. checked in half an hour, and... the soaps had collapsed! they'd melted slightly, just enough that they all fell over slightly to the side like a line of dominoes. my poor little soaps, so abused. i pulled the tray out of the oven and let them cool, and then carefully peeled them apart. they look really dopey. :-) i'll have to post pictures at some point. so, note to self: oven accelleration of CP soaps is best before the soap is unmolded...

the violet monoi oil soaps are still a very nice violet, despite gel phase (though they do have the characteristic darker cylinder through the middle, it just turned a darker violet, rather than discoloring the goatsmilk), and the citrus grove soaps turned out very nice (though i had to add a little bit of yellow oxide pigment, since i didn't have any annato seeds to make my usual bright orange, and though the FO on its own will color the soap a fair amount, because of the sweet orange EO, it's not as bright as i like it). but the apricot-freesia soap, while it turned out nice and a pretty shade of dusty pink due to adding FNWL's Rouge Flambé mica, seemed to lose some of the top floral notes of the FO, so it's a sort of mid-note fruity blend. nice, but not spectacular. sad, because i did like that FO. oh well, it's just not a CP-friendly fragrance, i guess. unfortunately, as i got it at the Ohio gathering last year and it's in an unlabelled amber boston round, i have no idea what vendor it's from...

test message. whee!

So I woke up at three AM today and finally gave up and got out of bed at 3:30. Did my taxes and got ready for work, which took me through 'til 5AM. I don't normally leave for work until somewhere after 8. What to do with all that extra time? Make soap, of course. Make /weird/ soap. And what else can come of weird soap but a story?

And with that intro, I give you today's diary entry, which I'm titling:

Embarassing True Tales of the Home Soapmaker, Part VI:
Having Lye Under Your Fingernail Really, Really Sucks

As if it being tax day isn't bad enough, for some reason I woke up this morning at 3AM and couldn't get back to sleep. I ended up getting up at 3:30 and messing around with my taxes, getting the state return e-filed and the US return ready to pop in the mail when the post office opened, took a shower and got ready for work. Which meant that I was done and bored by 5 AM. :) So I decided to make a batch of soap!

I've been wanting to try and do a complex swirl for a couple of weeks now, something with two or more colors. So I decided I'd do a swirl in my "8#" tray mold.

Yesterday I also got some sodium lactate, which I bought to give it a try because a number of people are singing its praises... it's supposed to speed trace, make your soap harder, and add emollient properties. I ordered that last week and the mailman brought it yesterday, so it was time to try that as well.

I used my same recipe that I always use, which is a tad heavy on the stearic acid, which can also speed trace up and heat the soap up a bit.

Now, you guys are probably saying, "But Sabrina, wait! That violates the Scientific Method -- only change one thing at once! Swirl /or/ sodium lactate, not both!" And you would all be much smarter than me. =)

So I made my eight pounds of soap. Eight pounds is a /lot/ of soap, you know? :) I mixed the lye and water and dissolved a bit of silk in it like I always do, and I melted down the solid oils on the stove and then added the liquid oils to them to cool them down. I added the sodium lactate to the lye water and went to mix that into the oils. WHAM! Instant trace. Not a seize, thank goodness, but it was pretty definitely traced. A nice pudding consistency. I knew I was going to have to work fast. Did that make me stop and think "Maybe I should abandon the swirl idea and just go with one color?" No. Of course not. Don't be silly. =) I divided the soap base up into four bowls. Had I been thinking straight (Ok, I'm going to cut myself some slack considering I woke up so early) I would have mixed up my colors in a little oil before I got started, but I wasn't, so after I divided the soap base up into the four bowls I realized I had to mix my colors up. So I used four little custard dishes and mixed a little bit of hydrated chromium oxide green, green oxide, ultramarine rose, and dark ultramarine blue up with a little olive oil, one color in each bowl. Then i added the colors to the soap base and started stirring. And stirring. And stirring. Lots of stirring. Very much stirring. =)

I almost forgot to mention the fun part. Yeah, that's not the fun part yet. :)

I love grapeseed oil. I use it pretty heavily. So I buy it by the pail. The 50# pail. ... I live on the third floor, in a walk-up flat. And the oil, which I brought home on Sunday, I actually left in the trunk of the car, because I had two 35# pails to carry up plus 60# of kitty litter, and I had to do laundry on Sunday too (laundry in the basement). So I was kind of exhausted from carrying heavy things up and down stairs all day and didn't want to deal with that 50# pail. So I was measuring out all of my liquid oils and realized I didn't have any grapeseed oil because it was out in the car. And where was the car? Well, the car was in the nearest parking spot I could find when I was parking, of course -- the car was 3/4 of a city block away.

I'm happy to say that it only took me fifteen minutes to get the oil from the car into the soap room, but it was a pretty sweaty fifteen minutes. And I'm excused from weight-lifting this week. =)

Anyways, stirring. Right, so I got the soaps all colored and ready to add the FO, which I had saved until last in case it caused any thickening or anything. (What else could go wrong?) Did I mention it was also the first time I was going to use this particular FO in CP? Ok, three new things in one batch. Clearly, I'm either an idiot or an optimist. :) So I split the FO up and added a bit to each bowl and stirred it like crazy -- two bowls at a time (one bowl per arm) -- until it was all integrated. Then I went to actually pour the soap into the mold.

Did I say pour? I meant glop. We're talking very-nearly HP glop consistency. Thiiiiiiiick goo.

Plus, my "eight-pound" mold? Only held about 2/3 of the batch of soap. Fortunately, I actually have two of those molds. Only one of them was set up, but the other was clean and just in the other room. So I poured the colors into the first mold and swirled them up, and set that mold aside, and went to put the rest of the soap into the other mold.

So now I have two huge molds full of soap that hopefully will turn out well. And it's after nine, so the post office is open, and I gotta go mail my taxes. =) One of the things about sodium lactate is that it's supposed to make it so that you can unmold much faster (like, 8-12 hours instead of 24-48), so we'll see how this stuff looks when I get home from work today.

--sabrina, 9:07 AM

Update:

ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.

ow.

I wrote up the diary entry and puttered around, put on my work clothes, earrings, washed my hands about a million times, put all the dirty soap dishes either in the stove (away from curious kitties) or in the sink for the harmless/no lye stuff, got my taxes and my magazine to read in line at the post office, and set out. I made it all of about a block -- which was only about 20 yards short of the post office -- before I realized that my right ring finger hurt. Since I'm a nailbiter, my sort of first reflex upon finger pain is "put it in your mouth." Lye zap!

What?

I'm honestly somewhat bemused about this. I don't know how it managed to get there. Since it was a bigger and more complex batch of soap than I usually make (I usually do one or two 3# batches at a time), I wore all of my safety gear -- glasses, cuffed gloves, even my lab coat with long sleeves. Normally I pretty much just wear the gloves while making my lye solution, and glasses the whole time. I mean, I even wore my gloves through cleanup. So it had to work pretty hard to manage to get under my fingernail.

Anyways, needless to say, I turned on my heel -- literally -- and went back home. (Walking at a slightly faster pace, this time. =) Cold running water + lemon juice = sweet sweet relief. Had to cut the fingernail off though, to make sure the lemon juice got to the burned area. :( Add a little bit of rose balm and a bandaid and I'm out the door, back en route to the post office, MacWorld in hand to keep me from staring blankly at the walls while in line. Mailed the taxes, made it to work, and now the only problem is that it's really hard to type with this stupid bandaid. =)

--sabrina, 10:47AM

Update:

Well, folks, looks like it's a goner. A thin and caustic liquid separated out of it, and it's full of little air pockets where I cut it (and conceivably it could be full of little lye pockets inside the soap), so I'm going to toss it. Waaaaah! It turned out awfully pretty though. Check out some pictures here.

Not a whole lot of news to report on except a couple of trial recipes and some changes to the site. :) Been busy lately... I finally gave up on writing my own links manager when I found one that did everything I wanted, for free. (Wahoo!) It took me a little while to get it working, but once I did get it, it's been great. So all of the Links and Suppliers stuff is in that, now, and you can vote for your favorite links, and it keeps track of which links are the most popular, and all kinds of stuff. I'm really pleased with it.

So I've got two current big projects for the site now. One is redoing the BBS with a better Forums package which will allow me to have different forums for different topics (one of which I will use to replace the current Recipes pages, so that'll be easier to take care of), and which will allow folks to sign up for a username so they can keep a signature and avatar and stuff on the forum for when they post, and keep track of what stuff they've already read, all kinds of cool stuff. It's by the same software design firm that did the Links package, so it's also free. Yay for people who give their software away to not-for-profit sites for free. :-)

The other project is finally finishing the Book Reviews section I started about six months ago. I just got distracted with the Links stuff and never finished it up. So I've got two reviews up now -- "The Soapmaker's Companion" by Susan Miller Cavitch and "Soap" by Ann Bramson -- and need to put up about another nine or ten. Fortunately I've read them all a million times, so writing the review is pretty much a matter of flipping back through them and reminding myself what I liked and didn't like, so hopefully it won't take another six months to finish.

I also signed up for the Amazon.com Associates program, which lets me put links up here to buy things through Amazon and get a cut of the purchase price. It's a pretty tiny percentage, but it's something. And since the site's traffic has been going up lately, my hosting bills aren't getting any cheaper. :) So that's something to see if I can get anything to defray the costs of running the site. I never want to put banner advertisements up because they're just so ugly, and I don't really want to start asking for donations because I'd probably have to declare that as extra income and deal with bizarro-land income taxes (well, technically, I have to declare any Amazon income as income too, but at least it's all on one form, assuming I ever get more than $10, which is the minimum to have "earned" before they send you a payment). I might end up putting a PayPal donation button up at some point, but I'd prefer not to unless I really need to. At least with Amazon, folks are going to buy books anyways. :)

Tomorrow afternoon I'm headed out to Northwestern University to do a demo and talk about soaping to a group of students who are doing a project. Should be fun, so I'm looking forward to that.

Ok, so on to recipes. :) Whipped shea butter seems to be all the rage at present, and so I succumbed. I made this really delightful blend a week ago that's 2 oz. shea butter, 2 oz. jojoba, a couple of capsules of vitamin E, a smidge of almond FO, and because I couldn't resist, a dash of mica for sparkle. I melted the shea and mixed all the ingredients together with my stick blender. I was expecting something slightly fluffier, but the stick blender didn't come through on that. Now, I really like that blend,it melts as soon as you dab it on your skin, and soaks in really well, but it also seemed to wear off fairly quickly. I wanted to come up with something with a little more staying power. So, for the second experiment, I tried mixing 2 tsp. soy wax, 2 tsp. shea butter, and 2 tsp jojoba, with a little vitamin E and one drop of rose otto (trust me, you don't need more than one drop -- it's strong). That stuff I whipped together with a whisk, and it turned out nice and fluffy. It melts nearly as well -- actually better, since it melts slightly more slowly, so it doesn't melt and slip off of the curve of your arm or whatever -- and is so light and fluffy it's really cool. Also, I think the soy wax did help contribute a little to help it stay on your skin. It's fabulous, so I'm thinking about making that for a swap I'm going to participating in coming up soon. I got these perfect little low-profile jars from Kangaroo Blue for it, too -- they're low and squat, with a 3.5" mouth, so you can just dip in for a little of the cream, without having to dig in like you would into a traditional jar when you started using it up. I just need to figure out how I want the labels to look, and which swap I'm going to make it for. :)

Well, I just finished cutting up a batch of soap for my pal Steph. She's addicted to mint soap, so I named this one after her. Here's a picture:

Here's the recipe. I made it yesterday using the CSDBHP method, and it's still pretty soft -- this recipe usually is because of the soft oils in it, but it always hardens up if I let it cure a little while. It's a nice recipe because it has a nice balance of oils and the castor makes it nice and lathery.

Steph's Peppermint Buzz Soap
Ingredients:
16 oz. Water
6.2 oz. NaOH (appx. 7% superfat)
Pinch silk fibre

4 oz. Sweet Almond Oil
3 oz. Castor Oil
4 oz. Coconut Oil
12 oz. Olive Oil
20 oz. Palm Oil
3 oz. Shea Butter
2 oz. Beeswax

Add to melted oils and mix well:
1/2 tsp. Chromium Oxide Green pigment
1-1/2 tsp. white/silver mica

Add at trace:
1 tbsp. poppyseeds
1 tsp. powdered pumice

Scent:
2 oz. Peppermint EO

I like scratchies, so I actually don't think this has quite enough poppyseeds in it. Next time I'll probably increase it to 1-1/2 tbsp. poppyseeds. The green pigment turned out exactly right, and the mica shows up pretty well (although a little bit more wouldn't hurt). It lathers really well at 24 hours (actually, at 12 hours... I showered with it this morning. Ah, the advantages of HP!). It's pretty soft and sticky yet though, so I'll hold off on rounding off the edges with a potato peeler until it firms up a little more, probably by tomorrow evening it'll be good.

Yay, fresh soap!

Two projects accomplished. #1: Go to Menards and buy Red Devil lye. Did that last night after work. It's sort of a pain because the nearest Menards is about half an hour away, but I got four containers of it while I was there, as well as materials for project #2: build a white-colored contraption that will enable me to take better pictures of things for the site. So what I did was buy two short laminated-pressboard utility shelves (one 10x24" and one 12x24") in white laminate, then two short metal brackets to bolt them together (unfortunately they didn't have short brackets in white, so I had to get gray). I neglected to think that I would also need screws for this little project, so I had to run to my neighborhood Ace Hardware today to buy wood screws. I also got some white caulk (on sale for $1!) to caulk the joint between the two boards, so as to eliminate that little line/shadow. So now my contraption looks like this:

Now as soon as the caulk sets up, I think I'll be able to take some really nice pictures. I have two bright (500W) halogen lights so that I can light it from two angles.

Now you might be wondering how that's really relevant to soaping or to the site. I had this idea the other day -- and I think it's a cool one -- about putting together project pages. Like, I'd take a project (say, making CP soap, or making a facial cleanser, or making bath salts or something) and write up all the instructions, then take pictures of all the different stages in the process. And then I could put together some really snazzy pages that hopefully would really help people do the project (I always think it's much easier when you have pictures!). So, here's hoping. :)

Well, long time no updates! As will probably shock no one, after five years I'm not quite as prolific a soapmaker I once was. I had such a stash of soap that I haven't actually needed to make any in months. The good news is that I have two-plus year-old soaps that are doing just fine -- no dreaded orange spots or any of that nonsense. :) Bad news though -- I went to make soap this past weekend (the bug bit me and I couldn't take it anymore!) and I'm out of lye! Can you believe it? What a pain. Now I have to figure out where to buy it, because I went to several stores and no one had any Red Devil. Doesn't it figure?

Interestingly, my little site here has started to draw some unwanted traffic -- SPAMMERS! Oh, man. I cannot write down how much I hate those guys. Seriously, I just went and deleted some idiot's post from the discussion board where he had figured out a way to make a porn site automatically pop up by inserting HTML code into the subject line of a post to the discussion forum. Yeah, that's what I want people visiting my site to see! Arrrrggggh. So I had to go hack the discussion forum program to make it edit any subject lines which include HTML tags. I almost made it re-program any subject line which matched to read "Only an idiot spammer would attempt to insert HTML in the subject line," but then I figured I was just being snarky and it was possible -- however unlikely -- that an actual soapmaker visiting the site might accidentally use the less-than or greater-than characters, and being deliberately insulting was probably not the best way to make friends. But man, I just want to take those spammers and smack them upside the head...with an anvil. But for now, until they develop technology that will allow me to reach through my computer and start delivering the smackdown to spamming freaks, I had to settle for fixing the program. This after just a few days ago I modified the program to add a "Report this message as spam!" link to each message posted, in addition to the other links on the discussion forum. How lame is that? If it gets any worse, I might have to look at using a BBS package where you have to sign up for a username and password in order to post... it would cut down on the drive-by spammings, but at the expense of making it more annoying for newbies to try and post. Sigh.

Anyways, the observant visitor will notice the really blatant ad on the front page now saying "as featured in Crafts Magazine!" Yeah, I'm totally psyched about that. They wrote me some emails back around October wanting to know if they could reprint some of the recipes on the site, and I gave them permission, but didn't know if it was actually going to happen or not. Well, it did! They sent me an advance copy of the magazine and I got it last week. Very exciting. The only gotcha is they misspelled my name! I don't know what it is about my name, but no one can spell it. Ah well. Hopefully the recipes will be useful for someone, anyways. ;)

I just unmolded a seriously gross batch of soap. Oh, I am so bummed about this. I had been wanting to make a nice plain oatmeal, milk, and honey batch with GMS and cocoa butter, no scent. I had the picture of the soap in my head for two weeks before I made it, which was last weekend. I just now got a chance to unmold it... after two years I finally discovered what those "tunnels" people reported with honey soaps are. Gross. Apparently the honey heats the soap up (which I saw, because the soap completely gelled, which was disappointing since it was a milk soap except I don't really mind tan soap, but anyways), and it formed a little "cavern" in the end of each log. Actually, there were two caverns in my logs. One end had a big cavern with like a half or three-quarters a cup of milky liquid in it, and the other end had a small cavern with like a tablespoon of what appeared to be that blasted honey, all congealed together. Now, this would be interesting for a science experiment, but dangit, I wanted OMH soap!!!! Phooey. I'm going back to using powdered honey next time. This sucks.

I also made, two weeks ago, some CSDBHP. This batch I wanted to try out something I heard about on the HotSoap list, which was basically to turn off the heat once the water was boiling and just wrap it up to keep the heat in and let it finish cooking that way, hopefully to result in lower temps. Well, it didn't work for me. The soap separated (yuck) and then I said the heck with it and turned the fire back on, and cooked it like normal. Only problem is that I didn't get enough water out. When we went to unmold it, it was *squishy*. Two weeks later, you can still dent the bars with just a moderate pinch. Sigh.

What is it about summertime and me never updating the diary? I dunno....maybe heat makes me lazy. Except this summer hasn't been hot up here in Chicagoland....it's been downright chilly. I don't think we've hit 90 degrees once. Seriously! Yesterday was warm, I was too hot wearing long pants, a shirt, and a denim shirt over that. :-) What a weird summer this is. Is it la Nina? Oh well. I'll leave it to the meteorologists to figure out why...I just think it's weird. :)

So I did my craft show!!! Happy craft show dance!!! It was a two-day event, outside, in a little park literally about a mile down the street from our house. Which was good, because we couldn't fit both the tables and the tents along with the goods for sale in the car all at once and ended up having to make multiple trips each time :) It worked out well, though. I had made a bunch of loaves of M&P to slice for $1/ounce, and those didn't start moving /at all/ (I mean AT ALL) until I took the slicer and sliced off a couple teeny slices to start with. Then people started grabbing the slices and sniffing them and /then/ they would buy slices. :) So maybe it's a nose-thing... Of the loaves that I made, I made two oatmeal, milk, and honey loaves, in two pours... one pour was heavily gold mica'ed, and I let it set up a bit and then sprinkled a nice layer of crushed oatmeal over the top, then poured the second layer. Only problem? The oatmeal kept the second pour from adhering to the first, so the darn bars split in half whenever you tried to slice one!! Good idea, bad implementation. :P I think next time I want to do something like that, I'll have to do three pours, with the one in the middle being a very thin and hot pour with oatmeal mixed in it, so then the second (hot) layer adheres to the first and the third (hot) adheres to the second, so it won't break apart. And everybody kept saying how great it smelled, they just didn't want to buy bars that were falling apart. (Go figure. :) Oh well. I used half a bar in the shower and it does smell nice. :) So my top seller out of those M&P slices was a bright blue bar with white mica, scented with Plumeria FO. I renamed it "Tropical Tempest" because everybody has "Plumeria," and I wanted to be different. :) Folks went ga-ga over that. I'm not surprised, because *I* went ga-ga over it too. ;) What I was surprised about was that I don't think I sold a single bar of Plum Pudding (which is renamed Plum Spice), in either the M&P loaves or GMS CP. I looooooove Plum Spice, I wonder why it didn't sell. But it didn't. I sold out of every CP bar but one of my Citrus Grove, which is a blend I came up with myself when I was trying to knock off Sweetcakes' Yuzu FO because it's so expensive. Turns out that what I came up with doesn't smell much like Yuzu, but it does smell nice, so I kept it and it turned out to be one of my faves. Those are really nice bars, too, I like how that recipe turned out -- it's high in castor, so it really, truly does take six to eight weeks to cure (unlike most of my other CP!), but it feels so niiiiiiiiiice when it's done. You can tell the difference with the castor oil. I'm amazed I went so long when I first started soaping without discovering the joys of castor oil. Anyways, back to the show. I ended up buying an EZ-UP tent a couple months ago, in anticipation of doing shows. I can't remember which model I got offhand, but it's the kind where you put the top on and it stays on. I got mine at Sam's Club, in a kind of family deal where you got the wheeled carrying case and the cheap sides as well. I think it was like $189? The price was comparable to places I was seeing online when I was researching tents, and I didn't have to deal with shipping, so -- YAY. It turned out to be a good thing that I got the sides, too -- both days of the show it threatened rain, and on Sunday we actually got dripped on. For some reason, even though the weather said "you're going to get pounded on," we hardly got any rain at all. Which was good! LOL! Although it was definitely windy, and I kept having to masking-tape things down to the table, like my signs in those little plastic picture frames, to keep them from blowing away. So all together, for two days, I sold about $300 worth of soap. Not too shabby! I sorta made back the show fee, if you don't count the tent and tables as a show cost. :-)

OK. Begin the stress: I dropped off the application (and $80.00 check!) for my first craft show today.

I'm really nervous. I've never done a craft show of any kind before. I knew a few months after I started soapmaking that I wanted to have a tiny little soap business, nothing ambitious but something fun and to bring in some money to pay for the hobby, but I wanted to wait until I was comfortable with everything and knew I would be selling a good product. So I waited until now. Actually, I would probably still be waiting, if it wasn't for Mary Lou, who owns the coffee counter where I get coffee in the mornings, on my way in to work in the mornings -- she and I chatted and soap came up, and she knew the lady who does this particular craft show, so she brought me an application one day and encouraged me to go for it. So, here I am! An official craft show applicant.

Oh, I've got an official business address and telephone number now, as well. And I ordered business cards yesterday, which I'll have to go by this evening and check the proofs so they can get them printed. I wanted those plain black business cards that look classy, no graphics or other things busying them up. The good thing about "simple little classy cards" is that they're cheap! LOL. And the place where I'm buying them from lets me bring my own card stock, since I didn't like any of theirs. I bought a ream of card stock (250 sheets) for $14.00 at Office Depot, which is a really pretty recycled paper with colored speckles throughout. They had recycled stuff at the printer's but it was either plain white or expensive. :-)

So, speaking of business things... I finally put stuff up on my web site. www.eclipsebodyworks.com. Check out the soap page -- I took snapshots of a bunch of my soaps with our digital camcorder, then used a photo program on our iMac to make them smaller and interlaced gifs. I'm a little peeved because due to the flourescent lighting downstairs, the white wall background on all of the soaps turned blue! And the colors look sort of washed-out. I need to take photos with better lighting. Oh well, the photos themselves don't look bad, I mean I like how I arranged the soaps in the snapshots. It's just that everything is kinda blue. :-)

I'm having an interesting problem with my bath salts. They keep "freezing" in place -- once they hit the air, and I get them scented and colored, they harden. I'm not quite sure what's going on there, because I'm using anticlumping dendritic salts as well as ordinary salts. I am using baking soda and citric acid together for fizz, but the clumping occurs if I skip the citric acid and it's just salts and baking soda. And I mean the stuff gets *hard*. I was really annoyed because I mixed up a half gallon tub and a gallon tub of the salts base (half gallon had citric acid in it, the gallon didn't), and the next time I went to scoop salts out, both tubs were harder than cement. And I can't even dump the stuff out because the mouths of the tubs are less wide than the tub "bellies." I have two cement tubs. Hmm, maybe I can use them as anchors for my craft show tent's legs!! It's pretty crummy "lemonade" as "lemonade from lemons" goes, but at least it's not a complete waste. The idea of using my wonderful dead sea salts as a tent anchor just kind of irks me. Aaaaaaaaaaaarrrrgh. I don't know what the heck is causing this, though, because none of my salts are kept in perfectly airtight containers, stored individually, but they all stay fine. Until I get them together, and then they *poof*. I mean, I just don't understand what is causing different kinds of salts that are individually unreactive to this humidity to turn into SuperClumpSalt when they're mixed together. I guess it's a good experiment to play with, but the waste....sigh. They never *used* to do this. :-P I could just get a dehumidifier for the soap room, but that won't help the people who buy my salts and end up with a rock when they get it home. Need to solve this little mystery asap. 'Cuz, really, I love using my own bath salts, and this is a total bummer. LOL!

On a slightly happier note, I got in an order from Cari at Sunshine Soapworks yesterday. I ordered ten pounds of shea butter, which is truly awesome stuff. I also got a bunch of herbs to use, and some polymer crystals for air fresheners. And I got a box of packaging in from E.D. Luce, which has good prices and you can order in relatively small quantities (let's face it -- I just don't need two gross of 4 oz PET bottles!!). I bought little jars for facial masques (which are great; if you haven't tried some you definitely should -- just take powdered clay (green, pink, bentonite, kaolin, whatever works best for you!) and mix it with a LITTLE water to make a little slurry, and pat it over your face. Let it dry and change color, and at that point you can rinse off with warm water.), and little bottles for lotion and liquid soap and spritzer, and little tiny glass perfume bottles, which are kind of art-deco and cute.

I would tell you the UPS saga, but if I got started on that I'd be ranting for a couple pages. Suffice it to say that I HATE United Parcel Service. Those guys just can't get it together. Maybe someday I'll look back and laugh -- but for now, I think I'll just ship things USPS.

It still feels strange to be writing the year as '2000.' One too many 'Yeah, that'll happen -- in the year 2000!' remarks while growing up, I guess. :-) At least I (mostly) write checks correctly.

So I changed the look of the main page. Hopefully it's pretty much the same. All I did was take out all of the images that were links. I used to have all the labels like "Recipes," "Tips and Tricks," etc. as transparent GIFs, so that I could use a font and not have the text underlined like regular links. But a week ago I loaded the page up and said to myself... "JEEZ, this is taking forever to load!" Then I thought about it and it clicked, so I decided to take down the GIFs and replace it with text. It took me a couple minutes to figure out how to not underline links, but once I got that done, I just rewrote all the links, and there you have it. For reference, the way that you do that is:

<a style="text-decoration: none" href="http://link.here.blah/">

Maybe it would've been easier if I use an HTML editor, but I do my HTML coding by hand... I always have, from my first web page when we didn't have WYSIWYG editors, and I probably always will. Editors annoy me (like word processors annoy me) because they do stuff that corrects me, like the program knows better than I what I wanted to type. No, I really did want the word 'cat' uncapitalised even though it's the start of a sentence; it's the name of a program. Ugh -- AutoCorrect drives me *batty*. The folks in my office can always tell when I'm stuck using Word to write some documentation because I get into conversations with the computer -- and not very complimentary ones, either.

So anyways, I'm excited because I got Catherine Failor's _Making Natural Liquid Soaps_ book the other day. If you have any interest in liquid soaps at all, I highly recommend it. It's got wonderful pictures showing the process. I noticed one thing that got me kind of confused, which on one page where she refers to "borax," "sodium borate," and "boric acid" all at once, and doesn't make it clear that while "borax" and "sodium borate" are the same thing, "boric acid" is definitively not the same thing. I mean, they sound so close together it's an easy mistake to make -- and I doubt that, if there hadn't been a huge discussion of this on the HotSoap list, I would have known the difference either.

Last Saturday was the second annual Chicagoland soaper's gathering. This year we had a lot more people -- maybe twice as many as last year. It was great! I had a blast. I did a demo of CSDBHP, which was really not difficult at all -- the demo, I mean -- because the soap is so *easy* to make. I mean, how exciting is a demo where you put soap on the stove, sit for 90 minutes, and then come back later? *grin* So we ate lunch in between "halves" of the demo, and it worked out alright, I think. I used Sweetcakes Vanilla Pear fragrance oil, and it smells *so* good. You know what's interesting is that I must not have stirred the fragrance in very well, because the curing soap is discoloring in stripes! It's actually really neat looking, and I might do that again, on purpose.

So the project for this weekend is beer soap. Miller Lite soap, to be precise. I have a friend who complained that I've never made him any soap, and he likes to drink Miller Lite, so I'm going to make some soap with Miller Lite for the liquid instead of water. This ought to be interesting. :) I don't think the beer smell will make it through saponification, but I'm kind of hoping that the alcohol in the soap will lend it some translucency. We'll see. :)

My entire life has been turned upside-down since I went back to school last fall. I've decided I'm taking the summer off. You know, it would be great to have my degree in 13 years instead of 15, but hey, sometimes I have to just live a little. ;-)

I had to throw away a batch earlier this week. What a bummer. I was so disappointed. It was an experimental batch, and I screwed up my measurements so it was way, way superfatted and, as if that wasn't enough, it had dairy products in it (either whipping cream or full-fat yogurt, can't remember right now). It was pretty clear that the dairy was going bad. What a bummer. I really liked the FO, too. And they were such a pretty white bar with a great green swirl, too. Sigh. Well, I learned a valuable lesson. Here's what happened....

So I wanted to see what the discernible difference was between soaps made with (a) buttermilk, (b) full-fat yogurt, (c) whipping cream, or (d) goatsmilk was. So I figure, I'll make four identical batches except switch which dairy product I use for the liquid in each batch. No problem. I made a large 12-pound recipe, figured out how much water, measured out my dairy products and stuck them in the freezer to get slushy, melted all my oils, and go ready to make the first two batches. But, what I didn't realize was: The addition of the lye to the water changed its weight. What happened was, the recipe recommended (let's pick a nice easy number) 64 oz. liquid. So I measured half of that in water: 32 oz. Added my lye. We'll say it called for 25 oz (I don't remember exactly, but that's a nice number). Dumped the 25 oz lye in the 32 oz water, dissolved, let cool, all that jazz. Then when I got ready to mix, I measured out my 48 oz. of oils into my soappot, and then I made my critical error. I figured, 32 oz. of water means I need 8 oz for this batch. So I measured 8 oz of the lye-water. That means I didn't use nearly enough lye-solution. What I should have done was add the lye to the water and then re-measure that weight and divided *that* by four to get how much to use for each set of oils. Errrgh. That was a sort of expensive experiment. After I made two of the four batches I realized my mistake ("Gee, how come I have all this extra lye-water? Oh, %^&*^%&*(%^@#!!!") and ended up pitching the lye water (hey, the laundry sink drains much better now). Finally used the rest of the oils in ordinary batches and they came out okay. Sheeeesh. So, chalk one up for stupid user error.

Phew. I haven't written a diary entry in a dog's age, seems like. I am really sorry about that, by the way. It's just that, quite honestly, I got into a few too many obligations this semester. (It's interesting how you just have to take one class and poof! you're back to thinking in terms of semesters. I suppose it helps that I work at a school, though.) Work has been just crazy-busy, we had an enormous project that suffered from scope-creep like nobody's business (scope- creep is a consultant's term that means "The client keeps asking for more and more and more over what he originally wanted and won't it ever just *STOP*????") and plus we're in what is hopefully the tail stages of an administrative evaluation which is now approaching three years in the doing. Had an audit just yesterday, people from the state came in to look at our network and tell us what we're doing right and wrong. Oh man, am I ever glad that's over. The actual audit itself wasn't too painful, it was mainly just the waiting and not knowing what they were going to come do. And I took two classes this semester, a half load, so I feel like I'm working two jobs, in a nutshell. I should probably be working on a paper right now instead of this diary, actually. Oh well -- I guess I'm living dangerously. :-)

Amazingly, I have had time to make soap. Or rather, I have *made* time to make soap. Since soap is still my decompressing method, it's immensely relaxing for me to come home and contemplate my palate of soapmaking materials and put something together. Last weekend I finally got up the gumption to make transparent soap from scratch. I bought the book last year and had been meaning to make the soap ever since, but either I didn't have Everclear or needed to buy more castor oil or something or other kept me from doing it. Actually I was pretty chicken, too. It sounds really complex and difficult, and you have to work with alcohol. Anyways, last weekend I finally did it. And it worked out really well! I actually posted some photos of the soap to the site, at the Photo Gallery. The photos didn't turn out all that great, so I only posted one of the transparent soaps sitting on the windowsill in my kitchen with the afternoon sun showing through them. Someone had asked me, on the SoapersCorner list, whether or not you could melt down this transparent soap and mold it like M&P, so I took an ugly bar and melted it down to see. It did melt really nicely, but it lost its transparency almost entirely. Kind of a bummer. :( Actually, it made an interesting cafe au lait color. But I was kind of hoping that it would be remeltable over and over so I could just make it when I wanted to and not have to buy M&P base anymore. Although I have to say I bought some base from Snowdrift Farm recently, specifically because theirs contains nothing other than soap and solvent (no SLeS or other foamers or detergents -- I wanted a pure soap M&P), and I was really pleased with it. That was another thing I did last weekend, was make some cute M&P. I had these star shaped metal tube molds from American Science and Surplus, and I used round PVC pipe -- what I did was mold blue M&P in the PVC, cut that resulting round log of soap into two half-moon logs, insert the half moons into the star molds, and did an overpour of clear with Australian Opal mica and shredded glitter into the star. So I'm going to call that one "Blue Moon, Starry Night." After slicing it into bars, I sprinkled glitter over the surface, so the bars are really pretty cute. They're for a swap, so that's why I went to all the effort. :) Anyways, here's the report I sent to SoapersCorner about making Failor's transparent soap:

Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 09:16:58 -0600 (CST)
From: Sabrina Downard
Reply-To: SoapersCorner@onelist.com
To: SoapersCorner
Cc: SoapPot
Subject: ~SoapersCorner~ Failor's transparent soap - Report

From: Sabrina Downard

Doin' the happy soap dance today.... I took a deep breath and made
transparent soap, with Failor's Copra soap recipe from the book,
Alex's instructions on how to skip the plastic tent silliness, and my
own basic CSDBHP soap-making thinking... and I now have a whole bunch
of beautiful transparent soap sitting on my kitchen counter top!

Woohoo!!!!

(For a while there in the middle I was getting pretty nervous... but
it all worked out! Yay!)

OK, so here's what I did. I can't remember the recipe, but I used the
Copra soap (palm, coconut, castor, and stearic) recipe, unmodified.

Put my huge stock pot with several inches of water on the stove to heat.
Mixed water and lye, added silk (my one modification)
Warmed palm, coconut, castor together in my small stock pot.
Melted stearic separately.
Mixed lye-water and palm-coconut-castor together, stick-blended to trace.
Added melted stearic. Woah, did that stuff turn into cream-of-wheat or what.
Put small stock pot in huge stock pot (double boiler), with both lids
tightly fitted on. Cooked for 1.5 hours over medium heat (water
at a full boil).
When soap was thoroughly gelled and no more tingle, added the sugar
solution and glycerin. Stirred it up, but the sugar and glycerin
didn't want to incorporate. Put the lids back on and let it all
warm up for a while thinking that would help it incorporate better.
After 10 minutes or so, figured the sugar/glycerin would incorporate in
its own sweet time, so I took the small stock pot out of the
double boiler and put it on a burner (no flame), added the alcohol
(Everclear -- phew, is that stuff stinky). Stirred quickly,
plopped the lid back on.
Turned the flame on its lowest setting for ten minutes.
After 10 minutes on the heat, turned off the flame for 30 minutes and let
the soap "rest." I have glass lids on my stock pots, so I could
watch it as it went. It was pretty neat, the alcohol would condense
on the lid and drip down, only it didn't drip like water, it kind
of...bloomed. It was neat. At this point, the soap mix was blobs
of translucent goo in a freeflowing amber liquid.
After 30 minutes off the heat, took my whisk and tried to stir the soap goo
into the liquid. Ended up with a whiskful of goo and not much
progress. Banged the whisk on the side of the pot for a good two
minutes or so just trying to get the stuff out of the wire. :)
Put the flame back on for 10 minutes, let sit for 30 minutes, stirred again.
After the third iteration of flame/rest, the soap was nearly completely
dissolved into the amber liquid. And it was pretty liquidy -- I
was pretty doubtful that that stuff was going to turn into soap,
it was the consistency of maple syrup (just a *little* thicker than
water). I stirred it up a bunch to get the remaining soap blob-lets
dissolved. At this point, every time I took the lid off, a film
quickly formed over the top -- like the little skin you get when
your M&P starts cooling, only very thin.
I let it cool, lid on, on the stove for about another half hour, so it
wouldn't burn off the scent when I added it. I added my mica
at that point (which I probably should have held off for a minute,
because I meant to pour a plain unscented/uncolored bar so I could
see what the end soap looked like, plain, but I totally forgot),
which was really pretty in the swirling soap (It was a mix of
white sparkle, copper sparkle, and 24 karat gold micas). After
that, I added my scent, which was vanilla (I knew the soap was
going to be amber-colored so I wanted a scent that would
complement the shade). I poured it through a sieve into my
upright two-chamber mold, which holds about 5.5-6#, and filled
a six-cavity (5 oz apiece) mold, and still had more left over,
so I ran downstairs to grab another six-cavity mold. By that
time, the sludge in the sieve had firmed up and the soap wouldn't
go through anymore, so I tried poking holes in it (didn't work
very well) and ended up just pouring the soap (with the skin-
blobs and all) into three chambers. So, all in all, I should
end up with thirty something bars of beautiful sparkly vanilla
transparent soap -- all from scratch!! I'm so excited.
This morning, I peeked... the mica stayed nicely suspended, and the bars
are *hard*! I'm impressed. I had my doubts about using so much
castor oil (13 oz, I think) but it seems like the bars are
just as hard, if not harder, than my regular CP. Also, I was
kind of worried because the bars were 0% superfatted, and that
makes it really important that the measures be entirely accurate.
But the soap feels so *silky* -- I was washing the stock pot
and just putting my hands in the soapy water made them feel
soft and smooth. The scraps lathered *great* (probably about
right, with all that castor and coconut) -- lasting bubbles.
Can't wait to turn these bars out of the mold in a few days!

Thanks Alex and Tab! Doin' the cross-country Happy Soap Dance :)


--
sabrina downard ~ Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change.
viv@ziggurat.org ~ Soapmaker's Resources: http://www.ziggurat.org/soap/

"Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself." -- Rita Mae Brown


So that's transparent soap. It's really cool to see the soap dissolve in the solvent-liquid. I'll definitely do it again.

I'm really bummed out right now. I had a logo designed for me, and it's really cute. I like it a lot. It took a while to narrow down the choices to it. Also importantly I spent a fair chunk of change having it done because I'm really quite awful at graphic design myself.

Anyway, my logo designer emailed me this morning. Seems she just got an email from someone, another soapmaker, who has been using some of the same artwork used in my logo for about two years. And she's not happy about finding it elsewhere.

So I'm kind of depressed about this whole thing. Here are the sides as I see it:

1. I don't want to have someone else's logo be similar to mine, any more than she wants mine to be close to hers.
2. But the clip art is publicly available and anyone can use it, so it would be somewhat unreasonable for someone to expect that I have to change.
3. I'm peeved that I paid a chunk of money to have the logo done and now I have to start all over and go through the process again and possibly pay more money.
4. But, my logo designer can't be expected to know every single time someone else uses the same bit of clip art in a logo somewhere.

Ugh. I don't know what to do about this. What a disappointment.

Update: Fri Apr 28 15:15:33 CDT 2000

Well, after this happened, I ended up asking my logo designer to make some minor changes to it. So she changed it around, and it looks really cute now, I think. Here it is:

I really like the wash of colors in the moon. So I'm happy, despite a few days of confusion and irritation, I still have a wonderful logo.

Sorry I haven't written in a while. Since I'm taking classes at night now, after work, to work on my degree, I've found my free time to update the web site has been sorely impaired. :)

I have made some nice soaps lately. A couple weeks ago I tried using fresh goatsmilk for the first time, and fell in love! It's great. I froze the milk until it was slushy and mixed it in with lye-water (half my liquid as water, half as milk), and ended up with lovely white bars from CP. Well, except for the peach bars -- which started white, and the FO discolored it! To a taupe kind of color. That was disappointing, that I spent my time worrying about whether the milk was too warm and was going to discolor, and then the darn FO turned it brown. (That was Lebermuth's "Georgia Spring Peach," by the way, which other than the discoloration is a lovely peachy FO. It's not as "ripe" peach as some other FOs, but it's a nice one.) The other milk soaps I made were a CP gms with Icicles from SweetCakes, which is a kickass FO that you should try if you haven't, it's just a great scent; a HP unscented GMS, which is all right but doesn't seem as luxurious as the CP Peach bar (which I've had in the shower all week and I think it's the best soap I've ever made, it's soooo silky smooth); and an HP Lettuce (Bramble Berry) GMS. The HP GMS did discolor, obviously, but it was a medium brown -- not bad. It was a terribly dark orangey brown when it was in the gel stage at the end of the cook though! I thought oh no, I've ruined my goatsmilk soap! But as it cooled, it lightened up in color and ended up as a tan/medium brown/dark beige type color. Not too shabby. Anyways, those bars were experiments in low percentages of or no coconut or palm kernel. I've got this awful itchy-dry skin in the winter time, and I kind of wonder if the coconut or palm kernel that I use -- I used to use high percentages of PK, or even PK and coconut in the same batch -- has been exacerbating the dryness problem. So far, the peach GMS is great in the shower. No after-shower itch at all, it's been great. How could you ever go back to evil corporate soap after making a batch that feels so niiiiiice?

I made some soap last weekend that was also somewhat experimental. Two batches, both with half water and half goatsmilk, freezer method. I tried Lecithin (lecithin, lecithin, lecithin -- I keep mistyping it as lethicin, I don't know why I can't get it right) for the first time. In case you've never seen it, it's this extremely viscous, mahogany brown liquid. Think brown/red molasses. You can add it to CP soap to help save a seized batch. So I tried that for the first time -- I had two FOs I was going to use for the first time, and I was suspicious so I got the Lecithin out "just in case." Of course my first batch seized right up, curds and whey -- ick. I dumped in about a tablespoon of the lecithin and stirred it up and it stopped the seize! Amazing. I was even able to use my stick blender to whir the blobs of soap back into liquid. It was great. Now that particular batch was 45 oz. olive and 3 oz. castor, with no salt to make it hard and no sugar to make it lather -- I wanted to make a gentle soap and see if that is good for my icky winter skin too. I know it'll be way soft when it comes out of the mold, but that's all right. I've got all the time in the world now that I only have time to soap on weekends -- In fact I left it in the mold because I won't have a chance to unmold it until Friday. :) So that worked out nicely, the lecithin. The second batch I made that day was a real oddball. It was 16 oz palm/16 oz olive with 8 oz grapeseed -- one of my faves -- and 8 oz cocoa butter, scented with Creamy Vanilla from Lebermuth. Here's the thing: I mixed my frozen goatsmilk and lye water and then wandered off and forgot about it. Totally forgot it for like three hours, I was seriously flaky this past weekend. I eventually remembered it and came back downstairs to the soap room and peeked at it -- It had turned into this really thick vanilla custard consistency. I mean if I had been some ordinary person, I would have thought it *was* vanilla pudding -- it looked EXACTLY the same. So I put it in a Pyrex measuring cup on the hotplate to warm it up a bit, to see if that would thin it down. Nope. So eventually I just decided to mix it in with the warm oils. That actually worked all right; the vanilla pudding lye sank to the bottom of the bowl and didn't want to stir in with my spoon. So I took the stick blender to it and it mixed right in nicely, I couldn't tell the difference from using liquid lye-water-milk stuff. So then, I decided to try putting the lecithin in first to prevent a seize from happening, on the off chance this other new FO was going to seize. So I dumped the lecithin in the beaker with my FO. That was a *dumb* move. Lecithin is water soluble; fragrance oil is *oil* soluble. Duh, Sabrina. So I had this gross mess of slightly brownish fragrance oil with orange-brown lecithin blobs floating around it it. I actually stuck the stick blender in the beaker to try to whir it together so it wouldn't be too big of a mess to add to the traced soap. Anyways, I dumped it in and stirred and stirred and got it all integrated and poured it into the mold. The next day, it had solidified into this orange loaf of soap with yellow speckles. I kid you not. It was like ... psychedelic vanilla. I can only hope that the brown discoloration from the vanilla will eventually cover up the splotches. :) Actually I haven't gone down into the soap room to see if it's improved in the past four days. That was one extremely weird-looking soap!

In other news, we finally have our digital camcorder. I can record and edit movies on the iMac, as well as taking digital still photos. Of course I immediately took the camcorder down into the soap room with the intention of recording when I made GMS soap this past weekend. Then I realized the soap room was a HUGE mess and there was no way I was going to record anything and post it on the internet with that mess on it, so I decided to clean up. By the time I was done cleaning it was midnight and I threw in the towel. I think I have homework this weekend but if I don't have much I'll give it another try. On the bright side, I haven't had *time* to mess up the soap room again since I cleaned house. :-)

Soapmaking So Easy, It Should Be Illegal.

Saturday night I tried, for the first time, closed-system double-boiler hot process soap. (CSDBHP for the acronym-addicted.) Oh Man! It was so easy. It was fabulous. I read a book practically the whole time, and when it was done I poured it into molds and let it cool and I had soap! I used it in the shower this morning. And it's wonderful soap. I can't sing the praises of this method enough. It's just so easy. How easy, you ask? Well. . . .

Step one: make CP soap. Don't worry about temps. Just mix your oils and lye-water and whiz to a trace with a stick blender.

Step two: While you're stirring your soap to a trace, put on a huge pot of water to boil. When it's a rolling boil. . . .

Step three: Put your pot of traced soap inside the pot of boiling water. Put the lid on both pans. Now ... set the time for half an hour and go do something productive, you big couch potato! (J/k.)

Step four: At half an hour, check your water level to make sure your water in the outer pot still comes up to the top of the soap in the inner pot and that the water hasn't boiled away. Add more boiling water from a teapot if necessary. Now set that timer for another half hour and go finish whatever you started.

Step five: Okay, your soap has been cooking for an hour now. You can try a taste test. So uncover both pots and dip in a plastic fork and then if you want, rub a bit of soap between your fingers. As it cools in the open air it should turn kind of waxy and stiff on your fingers, and if you touch your soapy finger to your tongue you shouldn't get a lye tingle. If you do, don't worry .... you still have more cooking to go. So cover your pans back up and set that timer for another half hour.

Step six: Get your molds and fragrance and whatever ready.

Step seven: After an hour and a half, take your soap double boiler (both pans!) off the heat, and set them (still nested together) in a sink of cold water to gently cool down. Take your trusty thermometer and measure the temperature of your soap in the inner pot. It should look, by the way, like some old melty vaseline ... like CP's gel stage, kind of. Whisk it up with a spoon to scrape down the sides (although it should all be nicely mixed due to the heating action of the boiling water) and when the temp is 190° Fahrenheit or less add your FO/EO. Now if your luck holds, you can pour the finished soap into your molds ... otherwise, scoop it into your molds and tap the mold on the counter after every glop to release air bubbles.

Step eight: Get a cold drink, because you now have completed soap sitting on your counter top! HAPPY SOAPERS DANCE!!!! Let it cool in the room temperature air, and when it's done you can cut it and use it right away. Sometimes it might need a day or so to fully firm up, but it's finished soap by that time.

So anyways, that soap was just so easy that it ought to be illegal. LOL. I wouldn't recommend doing it unless you were already familiar with basic soapmaking with CP and maybe direct-heat hot process as well (to be familiar with the steps and how the soap looks at different stages, not to mention how to handle the caustic materials), but it was a great method. Plus I love anything that's a success the first time I try to do it. LOL