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.
