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I think my Thing for last night was made of fail... Maybe...
I was kinda hungry for spice cookies, but I'm trying to avoid eating junk food so that I can lose some weight before the wedding. So instead of making cookies, I decided that I would make SOAP that SMELLS LIKE spice cookies. I had vanilla and ginger essential oils and lard, so I started puttering around making my soap.
The first mistake was dumping the water into the crock pot along with the oils, instead of holding it aside to mix with the lye. No matter, I decided to just dump the lye in with the oil water mixture and resign myself to the fact that it was going to take longer for me to get trace, as the lye wouldn't mix as readily in powder form.
I was right and my soap did take a bit longer to congeal, but it eventually did and I added my scents. Lovely... The soap smelled fantastic, but it didn't have any color or character... So I thought... Maybe if I add a little cinnamon, there will be some fancy texture/color variations to make this soap super-good!
Riiight... There were some texture variations all right. I discovered a soaping uh-oh called "ricing". Soap in "trace" phase looks a lot like vanilla pudding. The second the cinnamon hit my soap, it went from pudding to cottage cheese. FAIL.
The intarwebs had no advice for me on how to correct my experiment... So I continued with the heating and stirring of my soap in hopes that I could fix the problem...
Eventually I managed to get a mostly homogeneous mixture again, and I slapped my soap into the cute molds that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
eithni gave me for 12th night, but I guess I didn't work fast enough, because the consistency of my soap changed between the first mold and the second mold... The soap went from creamy to crumbly in less than 2 minutes.
Above you can see how the creamy batch looked in the mold.
Here, if you look closely at the top mold, you can see how crumbly everything got between mold 1 and mold 2.
This morning when I popped my little soaps out of the molds you can really see the difference between the creamy fishy soap and the crumbly fail flower soap. I'm going to let all my soaps cure for 4 weeks and then I think I'll mill all the crumbly soaps and re-mold them in hopes that I can rescue them.
As an aside for those of you who are wondering... The soaps do at least smell good. Raise your hand if you want a tiny fishy soap...
I was kinda hungry for spice cookies, but I'm trying to avoid eating junk food so that I can lose some weight before the wedding. So instead of making cookies, I decided that I would make SOAP that SMELLS LIKE spice cookies. I had vanilla and ginger essential oils and lard, so I started puttering around making my soap.
The first mistake was dumping the water into the crock pot along with the oils, instead of holding it aside to mix with the lye. No matter, I decided to just dump the lye in with the oil water mixture and resign myself to the fact that it was going to take longer for me to get trace, as the lye wouldn't mix as readily in powder form.
I was right and my soap did take a bit longer to congeal, but it eventually did and I added my scents. Lovely... The soap smelled fantastic, but it didn't have any color or character... So I thought... Maybe if I add a little cinnamon, there will be some fancy texture/color variations to make this soap super-good!
Riiight... There were some texture variations all right. I discovered a soaping uh-oh called "ricing". Soap in "trace" phase looks a lot like vanilla pudding. The second the cinnamon hit my soap, it went from pudding to cottage cheese. FAIL.
The intarwebs had no advice for me on how to correct my experiment... So I continued with the heating and stirring of my soap in hopes that I could fix the problem...
Eventually I managed to get a mostly homogeneous mixture again, and I slapped my soap into the cute molds that
eithni gave me for 12th night, but I guess I didn't work fast enough, because the consistency of my soap changed between the first mold and the second mold... The soap went from creamy to crumbly in less than 2 minutes. Above you can see how the creamy batch looked in the mold.
Here, if you look closely at the top mold, you can see how crumbly everything got between mold 1 and mold 2.
This morning when I popped my little soaps out of the molds you can really see the difference between the creamy fishy soap and the crumbly fail flower soap. I'm going to let all my soaps cure for 4 weeks and then I think I'll mill all the crumbly soaps and re-mold them in hopes that I can rescue them.
As an aside for those of you who are wondering... The soaps do at least smell good. Raise your hand if you want a tiny fishy soap...
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me me!
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I was going to mention to you but the crisco soap we made seperated on me a couple months later. It got oily and smelled sort of off. I didn't store it any weird temperatures. Did you have a similar issue?
I haven't made any other soap yet though I keep meaning too.
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If your soap separated, you may try re-batching it (http://www.millersoap.com/re.html) and re-molding it as I intend to. You and I used different scents, so it's possible that one of the scents you used was the problem.
I have not, thus far, had any problems with the ridiculously expensive oils that I purchased at the Perfumed Dragon.
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