Woo, moving forward!

In an attempt to escape the dreary, long process of lining molds with freezer paper (ahem…despite the fact that I have only ever lined a mold once before) I tried to coat my pretty break apart mold with silicone kitchen sealant. Note: Don’t do this. Seriously. It’s a bad idea. It may work perfectly well for either: a) Non-homemade break apart molds, b) plain box molds that don’t break apart or c) all your leaky kitchen applications, but it did NOT work for my perfectly plumb little mold. The result was disasterous, as expected. I could not fit the mold back together, for the sealant had slipped into the cracks and crevices and formed some pretty formidable clumps. I ended up having to scrape it all out (after it had set) with a palette knife and heaving a huge sigh and telling myself, “Never again.”

So back to the freezer paper method, which works well enough for my purposes. I am going to make a second batch this weekend. I have recieved my supplies from Texas Natural Supply–a strange assortment of stuff if there ever was one. I am now the proud owner of:

-8oz Citric Acid (for bath bombs, I just wanted to try my hand at one or two and this stuff is impossible to find locally)

-8oz Shea butter, refined (I realize that the refined has none of the healing properties of the unrefined but I am not looking for healing properties, I just want a moisturizer)

-8oz Cocoa Butter, deoderized and completely melted thanks to the weather (I love chocolate but I just wanted something plain to put in a lotion bar…)

-8oz Beeswax Pastilles, white (lotion bar)

-4oz Kaolin Clay (soap)

-2oz Green Tea Powder (for green colorant and … I don’t know, green tea goodness)

-1oz Poppyseeds (On a whim, I decided that they would make great exfoliants. Now I have to find a use for them in the near future.)

-1oz Ultramarine Lavender (lavender colorant)

And there you have it. I currently own lavender, patchouli, ylang ylang and eucalyptus essential oils so I suppose I will sniff those and decide which I will use for my next endevour. I was thinking a lavender/ylang mix, with purple swirls and some shea butter for moisterizing goodness.

First Batch!

I didn’t take many pictures because I didn’t think about it during the actual making process. Oh, well. I think everything turned out okay, and I will explain all the little details after I go over getting the last of my supplies.

First, my soap mold was completed yesterday. It’s very functional and small. It holds about 2lbs of soap, but that’s all I need. I never knew that lining a mold could be so freaking difficult! My dear boyfriend helped me through the process, and we finally figured out that if you tape the wax paper down to the individual pieces (it breaks apart so you have 5 pieces) it works better to get it back together. Teamwork, hi ho!

We had to find lye, too. Home Depot either didn’t have any or was out, and when we asked the man he just suggested we look over by the pool stuff (??). So we went over to Lowe’s, because you know, where there’s a Home Depot, there’s a Lowe’s, and they had some. Great! It was a bit expensive, like $8 for a 2lb jar, but that’s okay, I’d given up on minimizing cost for my first batch because I was so eager to do it.

When at home, we lined the mold first. That took the longest amount of time, I think, because we couldn’t quite figure out how to go about doing it. Then we went outside to mix the lye. Here we did a very bad thing: No goggles or gloves! I couldn’t find any of either in the house or the tool shop, so we went without. This is a bad thing to do. Lye is very dangerous. Ahh. I also accidentally sat downwind while he mixed–and got a mouthful of lye fumes. Yeoch! That burned.

Leaving the lye mixture to cool (in the 90 degree heat), we trooped back inside and melted the oils. I was very careful here. I had sniffed the lard before (by the way, it’s a 55% Lard/30% Extra Virgin Olive Oil/15% Coconut mixture) and I didn’t much like the way it smelled, so I melted the oils veeerrryyy slowly to make sure I wouldn’t get the “piggy” smell I’ve read so much about. I don’t want bacon soap! I weighed & put my oils all in a pyrex cup, nuked it for about 15 seconds at a time, and stirred a lot. No bacon smell. Success!

By the time the oils (slightly greenish in color, due to the olive oil) were melted I figured the lye mixture was cool enough. We brought it inside and poured the oils into the bucket with it. I hand stirred for a long time but got nowhere…I’m not sure how long this stuff is supposed to take to trace, but I wasn’t going to wait an hour while my hand fell off. So I let the boyfriend take out the stick blender and we started mixing that way. Whew! Loud little electronic device. It immediately lightened up the mixture–it went from a weird green to a light yellow, kind of like custard. It wasn’t trace, though. At least I don’t think so. When I dripped a few drops over the surface, they sank right in like regular liquid. So on we stirred, in 20 second bursts with the stick blender.

One thing I noticed about the stick blender is that it doesn’t seem to do anything when the head is below the surface. I don’t really know why this is. It whirred noisily, it buzzed, it groaned, but the liquid didn’t seem to be moving! When we brought it to the surface, it churned bubbles into our soap, which is bad…so we put it back under. Huh. I guess it mixed though, because eventually (about 10 minutes later, of these short bursts, we probably could’ve just mixed it straight through for 5 minutes) we got trace. Or something like trace. I poured in the EO (Eucalyptus) and mixed it well. Then we poured it into the mold, covered it with blankets & let it sit.

I peeked every couple hours, of course, until I was too tired and had to go to sleep. It didn’t seem to be gelling or getting hot. Bah! It was hardened up the next morning, and it passed my personal lye test, so I don’t think it’s lye heavy.

Now I Just have to let it cure, and we’ll see what goes down. :) I’ve already used a bit to scrub my hands, and it feels nice.

Pictures are under the cut.