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Wednesday, March 09, 2011

Soaping problems

Lavender Dreams

Here is my latest batch of swirl soap, it's not to bad, although I haven't smoothed the bars and beveled them with the beveler I won a while back...I'll do that later when I have the time.

I had trouble with the ones I swirled last week, I guess I kinda forgot a very important lesson I was taught in the class I took. Actually I didn't really forget it, just didn't know if I could totally have the oils at room temp, when I was using as many "hard at room temp" oils as I do in my soap recipe.

However, it turns out, I can and SHOULD still let them get back down to room temperature, before soaping with them, or my milk will burn after I pour the soap into my molds. Who knew it could still burn at that point in the game...I sure didn't. *giggle*

New Soap

As you can see, by the orange color in the above photo...these are the rejects I made last week. It is still usable, but not to pretty, so I will probably just grate it up and use it in laundry soap. That doesn't have to be pretty. LOL

Needless to say I learned my lesson. Course that means I can't make as many batches a day, but that's ok...it's not like I'm selling it or anything. LOL Guess it's not to bad though, I think I was about due to mess up a batch (or two) of soap, just hate that it was with my expensive oils, instead of tallow. LOL And since I can still use them for something, I can't complain to much. :)

As you can see, the "swirl" down in the soap, isn't near as neat looking as what I tried to do on top of it, but it's still neat having lines of color in the soap, instead of having it all one color. It is more of a marbling, but I'm still happy with that. Maybe eventually I can afford a different kind of mold, where I can swirl the flat side of a bar, to get one side that is really pretty...like this one. But till then, I'm quite happy with what I have!! :)

I do have a small problem though...I am totally out of one of the oils I need for my soap, and still wanted to make 3-4 different flavor's of soap (or am once I make one more batch tomorrow...the oil is cooling as I type). *sigh* Darn expensive hobbies anyway. *giggle* Have to wait till I see how much it is going to cost for a repair first though, before I can order more. Guess it's a good thing I don't HAVE to have them ready by a particular time. :)

A friend of mine put in a request for some Udder balm type stuff (with palm fruit oil - which seems to be as good as coconut oil for some healing salves - and peppermint in it), that is whipped like my whipped body butter, so it's easy to apply. DH thinks that is a great idea too, so I'm in the process of trying to come up with something like that. We will see if what I'm attempting now, is going to actually turn out right or not. It's kind of a long process, as things have to be melted together first, then left to cool, with occasional whipping of them as they cool. Hopefully I'll know tomorrow how it turned out. I hope it works! :)

Anyway, that's the soap problem I mentioned on my Saturday post. Using milk, instead of water, makes it a little harder to get good bars, but it's so worth it, to have the extra nice milk soaps. :)

Better go whip the udder balm again, and get some rice started for supper. Have a great rest of the day!!

1 comment:

  1. My kids saw your pictures and now they want to know how to make soap. *lol*

    http://scrapgrrl.com/

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