Diary of a Soapmaker

Ugh. Web site maintenance is hard

Mon, 14 Mar 2005 15:41:57 GMT

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.

First attempt in the new apartment

Thu, 19 Aug 2004 20:07:02 GMT

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 And since I don't have a balcony and our rooftop access has been revoked, that means going down in the elevator to the back alley.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

photos of the vanilla pear swirl soap...

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 04:17:15 GMT

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. :)

new recipe - vanilla pear swirl deer tallow soap

Mon, 15 Mar 2004 15:55:36 GMT

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!

Sun, 04 Jan 2004 21:36:31 GMT

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...

first post!

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 05:05:31 GMT