Red Rock Canyon Soap - White spots are undissolved lye

Except, somehow I didn’t get the lye stirred into the goat’s milk very well. So frustrating!! The only way I know how to make a soap with fresh goat’s milk as 100% of the liquid is to freeze it into cubes, and add the lye directly to the frozen milk cubes. I’m not entirely sure, but it seems like the problem might be not stirring it well enough (or fast enough?) when I first pour the lye over the milk. I’ve had this problem before with goat’s milk soap, but never this bad. There are white spots on every. single. bar. If anyone has suggestions on how I could do this differently without scorching the milk, I’m all ears!

Meanwhile, Clean the World is about to receive another box of soap!

The worst part is that I ignored all the warning signs – and they were there!

1. I shouldn’t have been trying to make two batches at the same time. In addition to the Bye Bye Bugs batch, I was making the Caribbean Diva at the same time. Probably got me distracted when I was measuring. (Thankfully THAT batch turned out fantastic!)
2. It’s been several months since I’ve made a double batch in the big soap pot, but I was still thinking it seemed a bit low when I added the lye solution. I brushed it off, pridefully thinking, “Of course everything is in there! I remember adding all of it!”
3. It actually traced rather quickly. This time I attributed it to the steep water discount.
4. Then of course the molds weren’t all the way full. That should have really set off the alarms. Guess what I told myself at that point – “Oh, it’s just because of the water discount, and I think I recalculated this recipe so I wouldn’t have so much scrap left over after I cut it.”
5. Final straw – very hard and brittle soap the next day. My poor soap cutter could hardly handle it!

Ruined Bye Bye Bugs Soap

Now I have 30 pounds of soap to send to Clean the World, which includes the batches I made in the Story of Two Soaps. This could make me incredibly depressed, but I’m choosing to see it as a blessing for those who will receive the soap from Clean the World in its rebatched state.

All the Bye Bye Bugs Soap that will be going bye-bye!

Today, I’m melting more oils for another double batch of Bye Bye Bugs. Oh and another regular batch of soap – something new and summery. I’m thinking it will either be Sweet & Sassy (which I’ve made before) or Tahitian Vanilla (a fragrance I’ve been holding onto for no good reason). I’m also making my first test batch of shampoo bars. I think that’s it. You would think I would learn my lesson about making more than one batch at a time. But have you seen my curing rack??? It’s nearly empty!

After reading the post by Ruth of Sirona Springs about how gelling the soap can affect the outcome of the color, also I decided that preventing gel might help keep the soap color lighter, so I put the soap in the refrigerator. I didn’t get a chance to cut it for several days, and it was still somewhat sticky even after waiting that long.

I did have one problem, however. At the last minute I decided that the cherry red soap colors weren’t going to be red enough, so I added some powdered red 40 to the glycerin base that was already loaded with red oxide and red talc dye. It didn’t have enough time for the powders to get saturated:

Cherry Soap with Bleeding Red Dye

So I guess this counts as a test batch. Good thing it was a small one! I’ll let it cure out and see how much it will discolor, or if the bottom will stay a nice creamy white before I attempt this one again. And I will make it again. It smells pretty fabulous!

Here are a few bars from the small batch of soap I made yesterday with the embedded soap scraps:

Antique Lilac Soap - The Final Reveal

Before you go jumping up and down and raving about how great it turned out, I have to tell you something. I’m a big fan of books and movies with happy endings. I want all the loose ends tied up, and everyone to live happily ever after. I think this is part of the human longing for heaven – a place where all is perfect and lovely and pure. So, while this soap looks good on the outside, I have a feeling that I won’t be using the same embeds for a regular-sized batch this week as planned. There is no perfect ending to my plan to salvage the lilac soap.

The voice of reason came through my friend Sharon who pointed out that the only way to fix this soap is with more lye. Otherwise, the risk of DOS (dreaded orange spots) will probably be pretty high, considering how much extra oil is in the soap. For the non-soapmakers reading this, DOS is really just one way that rancid oils manifest themselves in handmade soaps. Without knowing exacting how much excess oil is in the soap, I really can’t know how much lye to add. Besides the fact that it would require rebatching the soap. Something I’ve long since given up on. So, I’ll keep an eye on this batch to see how it fares over time, but I won’t be selling it.

I will, however, make up a brand new batch of Antique Lilac soap this week that I will feel confident about selling. And quite possibly, at some point, I will try this method again with perfectly good soap shreds in a different soap, because it really does look good, doesn’t it?

Today I made a small batch of soap with the soap shreds embedded in it to see how it would work. Using my nine-bar recipe, I measured everything out, with the soap shreds as one quarter of the weight. I am very grateful for all the suggestions that were given on how to make those soap shreds less sticky! There were lots of great ideas, and any one of them would have worked, but I decided to go with cornstarch since that’s what was on hand.

So, after adding four teaspoons of cornstarch to 11 ounces of soap shreds, it looked like this:

Lilac soap shreds, coated with cornstarch

(Disclaimer: I didn’t take the time to get a correct white balance setting on my camera, and I don’t know how to use Photoshop well enough to fix the photos, so they will look a bit yellow.) Since the shreds are mostly white, I figured a nice purple soap base would look great with the white specks in it. After pulling out a half cup of the white soap to swirl into the top, I added the purple colorant and some lilac fragrance.

Mixing ultramarine violet oxide into the soap base

Once the soap base was well-mixed, I stirred in the soap shreds. Their volume seemed almost equal to the soap base!

Mixing in the soap shreds

Here’s how it looked all stirred together, and in the mold:

Purple soap with white shreds

Then I poured the remaining white soap on top and poked around a bit with a wooden skewer. The purple soap was setting up already, and the white soap was still at a light trace, so they didn’t want to mix very well. I think the overall effect will be nice though. Especially with more glitter on top!

Antique Lilac Soap Remake - all finished in the mold

Tomorrow we’ll see what it looks like when it’s cut. I have a good feeling about this, and am believing that I will be able to make a full-sized batch with the rest of the soap shreds next week!

Antique Lilac Soap

I made it two months ago, and I’ve been waiting to see if it would harden. It was half of a batch that I split – one half was lye heavy and completely unusable, and this half ended up super-superfatted, so it was extra soft. And still is. While I hate to mutilate those beautiful swirls, I’ve decided to cut it up and put it in another batch of lilac soap. Earlier in the week, I pulled out my food processor and attempted to grate it up. I was somewhat successful:

Grated Antique Lilac Soap - and a gummed up food processor

You can see how soft it really is! Sort of reminds me of this:

Play Dough Spaghetti

As I have time this week, I’ve been laying out the soap that wasn’t completely balled up onto trays, hoping more air will make it less sticky so that I can chop it up and it will disperse in the soap.

Trays of grated soap

When I was first thinking about this project, I was hoping I could put the grated soap in the food processor with the blade and really chop it up, but now I know it would be a gooey mess. So today I took a tray of soap that has been airing out since Sunday and chopped it up with a knife.

Chopped up soap

Still feels a lot like play dough. If I were to count up all the hours I’ve spent on this soap and figured it into the sales price, no one could afford it. *sigh* I’m thinking about using this chopped up soap in a smaller batch to see how it works before I commit to a full-sized one. Could be the smartest thing I’ve done yet!

I’ve also been contemplating what I could possibly coat this soap with to make it less sticky – like a powder of some sort. I think I’m all out of tapioca starch. Any other bright ideas?

*cue music as we go back in time*

Last November I had a brilliant idea to make a double batch of coffee soap, but split it in half after adding the lye solution to the oils, and fragrance each half differently. I even added different colored swirls to each batch. You may remember these soaps – one was Cinnamon Bun and the other was Moroccan Spice.

Cinnamon Bun and Moroccan Spice Coffee Soaps

Fast forward to yesterday. I was experimenting with a new recipe to see if I made my soap base without rice bran oil if I could add titanium dioxide without having a crackling effect. I wanted to make two kinds of soap out of one batch, so I started out the same way. Poured the lye solution into the oils, stirred with a spoon, then poured off half of the soap to make a batch of Antique Lilac first since I knew floral fragrances tend to seize. This was going to be my true test to see if the soap would come out without crackles. Here’s what my last batch of Antique Lilac looked like two years ago:

Antique Lilac Soap by Great Cakes Soapworks

Antique Lilac Soap by Great Cakes Soapworks

Unfortunately, I couldn’t cut this one yet because it is SUPER soft. And I was dying to cut some soap today, because I just got my new soap cutter this week and I haven’t tried it out yet!

So, I pulled out my second batch – Rosemary Mint. Made with rosemary and peppermint essential oils, and just a little bit of chromium green oxide – no titanium dioxide. This was the test batch to see how white the new soap base would be by itself. I spent quite a bit of time making layers and swirling the top of this one! It was quite hard when I pulled it out of the mold, so I was excited to try it out with my new soap cutter:

Rosemary Mint Soap by Great Cakes Soapworks

I positioned it into the cutter….

Rosemary Mint soap in the soap cutter

…pulled down the wires…and the soap was so hard it just crumbled on the edge. Then I realized that the wires needed to be tightened. But even after I tightened the wires, they wouldn’t go through the soap! I even got out my soap cutter box to see if I could get a blade through it. No luck!

Rosemary Mint soap crumbles

It was right about this moment that I realized that this soap was definitely lye heavy and completely ruined. I really wanted to cry.

So have you figured out what happened yet? I believe that the lye solution was not fully incorporated into the oils. When I poured off the first half of soap, I left more lye in the second half. Moral of the story: Mix the soap just a little bit more before splitting a batch like that – if I dare try it again. I’m feeling a bit gun-shy right now.

The good news is, it appears that not having rice bran oil in the soap base prevented crackled soap – at least so far. I’ll have to verify that after I can cut the soap and see what it looks like inside. IF I can ever cut the soap. I’m praying pretty hard that the Antique Lilac soap will eventually set up!

Thanks to Michele of Tierre Verde Soaps for sharing her experience in trying to find the solution to smooth soap made with titanium dioxide! I will definitely be making more soap without rice bran oil in the near future.

Sweet Pea & Rhubarb Soap Test Batch #1

The problem was that the cream-colored soap underneath had set up quicker than the red soap. As I drew my bamboo skewer through the dot of red to make the heart shape, it created a ditch in the cream soap, and the red soap bled out into the ditch. Boo hoo. I tried to fix it, but of course then I just created little pink smudges. The good news is, I think I have a solution to the problem! I’ll just have to wait for this soap to set up so I can take it out of the mold and start over tomorrow. Stay tuned!

P.S. Thank you so much for the overwhelming response to the soap grab bags I posted yesterday. They are all gone!

I took what I knew about the Caramel Dip fragrance that I recently purchased, and attempted to create something special. The fragrance lacked pizazz coming out of the bottle, so added a bit of Green Apple and Brown Sugar fragrances to kick it up a notch. The notes from the supplier said that the Caramel fragrance would discolor to a dark brown. And I’ve soaped the Green Apple before all by itself so I knew it was going to set up fast. My plan was to pull out a couple cups of soap before adding the fragrance, color it red, and swirl it back into the pot. I also added a good portion of titanium dioxide to the main soap, hoping it would lighten it to a more caramel color.

As expected, the soap started setting up almost immediately after I added the fragrance. I was able to swirl in the red – just barely! – and by the time I poured, it was chunky!!! Needless to say, there was a whole lot of smushing to get that soap in the mold. I had no idea what I would get.

Here’s the mess that greeted me when I pulled the plastic wrap off:

Caramel Apple Soap Unveiled

Yes, that would be fragrance oozing out the top, and a bright pink and brownish colored soap!!

I pulled it out of the mold, and peeled off the freezer paper, and was still shocked, mostly by the neon pink:

Bottom of the Caramel Apple Soap

Here’s where I’m going to leave you hanging. I’ve sliced the soap. I have about 16 decent bars out of the 24 I usually get. There are 7-8 smaller “bars” and the same amount of soap balls. Fortunately, the fragrance wasn’t oozing throughout the entire soap, but it seemed to be isolated to the top quarter or so – more where I was squishing it, I think. The only reason I’m not showing you the “good” bars is that I’m sure the color is going to change as it cures. The scent still isn’t impressing me, but I’m hoping that also changes as it cures.

Tomorrow, I’m planning to post about my experiments with the fragrances I received as part of the SOAP Panel from Brambleberry.

Clarifying Soap with Lye Pocket

You’re probably wondering what’s in this soap that makes it behave so strangely. Well, I’m guessing the guilty party would have to be the witch hazel I use as part of the liquid. It makes a strange brew when I add the lye to it. The others, although this has yet to be confirmed, would probably be the small amount of beeswax and stearic acid. One more unusual ingredient is the herbal-infused olive oil; however, I don’t think this adds to the quick tracing issue. It’s just a time-consuming part of the process.

So why do I continue to make this troublesome soap? Because you can actually tell the difference between this soap and all the other soaps I make. One of my customers is thrilled that it leaves her oily face feeling squeaky clean without causing more oiliness. Several have remarked at how it cleared up rashes on the backs of their arms. There is quite a following. So, I press on.

Fortunately, I usually make two separate batches of this soap at the same time. It’s just easier that way. Anyway, the good news is that one batch turned out perfectly fine! The other one is going You Know Where. (Or if you don’t know where, it’s this awesome organization called Clean the World!!!)

More good news: I made the Cinnamon Apple Peach soap today! My house smells so good!!! Hopefully I’ll have time to get it cut and take pictures tomorrow.