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 And since I don't have a balcony and our rooftop access has been revoked, that means going down in the elevator to the back alley.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. :)