Cutting the Vanilla Hazelnut with PKO

I cut the Vanilla Hazelnut soap into slices.  Overall, I'm pleased with the results, although there's certainly room for improvement.  But before we talk about the cut soap, let's look at soap patties.

I like to cut the soap when it's still soft enough to mush into patties; I usually make 2 or 3 per batch.  A lot of people like to make soap balls. But I find balls hard to use in the shower.  You know how you twirl a bar of soap around in your hands to work up a good lather?  It's hard to do that with a ball of soap--it's to slippery and too round.  But a patty is flatter and easier to twirl.  I also like to press a design into them with a cookie press.

As you can see by looking at the side of the loaf after I took it out of the mold, I'm still getting lots of air pockets.  It's because the soap is so thick when I get it into the mold.  The good news is that the top was thick enough that it didn't flatten out when the soap gelled.

Air pockets aren't as noticeable in the cut bars.  The bottom brown and white layers are still not as deep as I'd like, but they aren't bad.  A little more work on them and they'll be perfect!  

I really like how the white top is piled up in the middle on this slice.  That didn't happen on all of them, depending on where I cut compared to the swirled top.

I like how the cocoa looks on the top of the bars.  But you can only barely see the cocoa line, and only in places.  I obviously didn't get it thick enough.  But at least the bars won't break in half because the line was too thick!

Ruth likes the Vanilla Hazelnut fragrance I used; he can't stop sniffing them.  Yes, I know "Ruth" is a strange name for a male dragon.  I named him "Snowball".  But after I read The White Dragon to the dragons, he wouldn't answer to anything but "Ruth".  So, "Ruth" it is!

I really need better lighting.  I've seen instructions for making a light box.  Guess I'd better make one.

You can see that not all the tops are as nice as the one earlier.  I really like how the swirled tops look in the mold, but I like the more "mounded in the middle" look once the soap is sliced.  So next time I'll try that approach.  Maybe I can swirl it up into mounds, or something.

Heliotrope really likes to ham it up for the camera!  He's always trying to climb on the soap when I'm taking pictures.  So I just snapped his picture.  I think Heliotrope would make a cave out of the soap if he could!

Vanilla Hazelnut Soap with PKO

I just finished making a new batch of Vanilla Hazelnut soap, and I just realized I forgot to put the ground hazelnuts and oatmeal into it.  Drat!

I used palm kernel oil (PKO) this time instead of coconut oil, because I wanted to make soap for some friends who are allergic to coconuts.  PKO and coconut  are the two oils that produce the most lather.  So if coconut oil is out, PKO is in!

The Vanilla Hazelnut fragrance oil is a very well behaved oil:  no acceleration, no seizing, no ricing. So I normally have plenty of time to do decorative techniques.  In fact, I usually have to wait for the soap to set up enough to do them!  But this time was different.

PKO sets up much faster than coconut oil.  At least, it did for me today.  Things thickened up really fast.

Like most vanilla fragrance oils, Vanilla Hazelnut turns soap brown.  I like to use this to my advantage, and leave some soap un-scented--and therefore un-brown.  Then I can swirl the white and brown together, or do layers, or whatever.

Today I decided to do a layer of brown (darkened still more with a bit of cocoa), a cocoa line*, a layer of white (whitened still more with a bit if titanium dioxide), another layer of brown, and a swirled white top with a bit of cocoa and glitter sprinkled on top.  I did all that, but it was really getting thick.  The final layer of white looked like whipped shortening--it was that thick.  But I got it on there, and swirled it in, and sprinkled the cocoa and glitter on top.  The cocoa and glitter actually look good together.

The soap in now in a warm oven, saponifying its heart out.

I'll have pictures of cut soap later.  But for now, there's just a picture of the soap in the mold before it went into the oven.  Too bad you can't see the glitter in the picture.

*A cocoa line is made using a thin layer of cocoa in the soap.  Pour a layer of soap, sprinkle some cocoa over it, then pour soap over the cocoa.  When you cut the bars, you can see a thin dark line across them.

If you use too much cocoa the two layers of soap don't adhere to each other and the soap can break there.  If you don't use enough, it's hard to see the line.

A cocoa line is a form of pencil line, which can be made with pretty much any powdered colorant:  colored clay, mica, ultramarine.

Creamy Violets Soap

Last weekend I made some "Creamy Violets" soap.  Or at least I tried to.  I used Violets fragrance oil, a little bit of yogurt, and some lavender ultramarine swirled in with the cream-colored soap.  I swirled the tops and put it in the oven to saponify (turn from fats and lye into soap).

The soap gelled nicely in the oven.  But when I removed it, I could see that the nice swirled top fell flat.  And you can see that I didn't put enough ultramarine in it to make a nice color.  And one whiff told me that the Violet fragrance oil had been mostly eaten by the lye.  Drat!

Even after cutting the bars, they don't look all that great.  And I couldn't decide whether I like the smell.  After a couple days I decided that if I can't decide whether I like the fragrance--I don't like the fragrance. 

So this coming weekend I'm going to try rebatching the whole batch (minus the bar I'm currently using).

To rebatch soap,   you grate it up and melt it down with a little bit of liquid (not too much).  Since there's no lye in the soap, you can add your fragrance or any other delicate ingredients, and they won't be eaten by the lye.  Then you glop it into a mold and let it harden.

The downside to rebatching is that soap is really thick.  If you try to thin it with too much liquid, it takes forever for the liquid to evaporate and the soap to harden.  It's hard to get the soap into the mold without air bubbles.  And the texture is often not as nice as normal soap, because it's hard to melt all the chunks of soap.  But it is often the best way to save a batch of failed soap.

So this coming weekend will be the great experiment:  can Bonnie save a batch of soap by rebatching it.  Stay tuned ...

Soap Supplies Are In

I received my order from Majestic Mountain Sage last night.  I thought it might not arrive until Monday, so I'm stoked that it's here already.

So what did I get?  Here's the list:

1. palm kernal oil
2. cocoa butter
3. sweet almond oil
4. "Energy" fragrance oil
5. ultra fine irridescent glitter
6. pink ultramarine
7. glycerine

The palm kernal oil is great for making lots of big, fluffy, lather.  Usually I use coconut oil for lather, but I have some friends who are allergic to coconut oil.  So I will make soap with palm kernal oil for them.

I got the cocoa butter to make chocolate soap.  I'll use some of the "Vanilla Hazelnut" fragrance oil, along with the natural fragrance from the cocoa butter.  I'll also add some baker's chocolate.  Yum!

Vanilla Hazelnut soap

I use sweet almond oil in almost all my soap.  It's a wonderful oil that makes the soap nice and smooth and creamy.

"Energy" fragrance oil is a "refreshing citrus scent with fruity notes of mango, papaya and lime".  It smells fantastic!  I can't wait to soap with it.  If the fragrance stays true in the soap, it'll be perfect!

I'm experimenting with using more decorative techniques in my soap, rather than just making rectangular bars.  I'm practicing piping with soap, and I'll sprinkle some of the irridescent glitter on top.  Some of the things other soapers are doing are jaw-droppingly gorgeous.  They've really inspired me to do more.

Rectangular bars and handmade soap patties

I disperse the pink ultramine in the glycerine--it makes it easier to blend into the soap. I use this pink to swirl into plain white soap for my "Rain Orchid" soap. I think I'll also use it in my "Violets and Roses" soap. I haven't make "Violets and Roses" yet, but it's definitely on the list. I'm thinking ... pink and purple swirled together, with white soap decorations piped on top (and glitter)!

So now my problem is ... what soaps to make this coming weekend?  Before my supplies arrived I planned to make a batch of soap with the "Forks" FO.  And I still want to do that--it's a wonderful fir-tree scent.  But I also want to make the "Vanilla Hazelnut" soap for Colleen.  And I can't wait to try the chocolate soap.  There isn't time to do all of them.  Well, I'll figure something out.

I'll definitely post pictures of whatever I decide to do.  Until then, happy soaping!

Gardener's soap with calendula

Cucumber and Aloe Soap with Yogurt

Last night when I made soap I tried a few new things:

1. the Cucumber and Aloe fragrance oil from MMS
2. taking a water discount and adding yogurt to the oils
3. using a few ounces of shea butter rather than the sweet almond oil I usually use.

I used a method commonly called "CPOP", for cold process, oven method, but which I like to call "warm process."  Why "warm process"?  Because we call it "cold process" when we don't add heat to the process (other than melting the oils).  We call it "hot process" when we heat up the soap to fully saponify it.  But I'm just putting it in a warm environment to speed things up a bit, so "warm process" seems good.  However, I will use "CPOP,"  so other soapers won't be confused.

I wanted to do a two-color layered/swirled soap, and by the time I got the soap traced, some poured out to leave white, and the stuff still in the pot colored nicely, it was really thickening up.  By the time I got all the soap into the mold it was like stiff mashed potatoes.

You can see the air holes from the thick soap, and the lumpy mashed-potato-looking top.  It's hard to make a swirled top look nice when there are thick, mashed-potatoes lumps in it!  I'm weird--like lumps in my mashed potatoes.  Not in my soap tops, though.

I left the soap in the mold, in my warm oven, all night and cut it this morning.   Wonder of wonders--the cut soap looks better than I expected.

The tops are noticeably lumpy, but they don't look bad.  And I really like the way the layers came out.

Even with the nice layers, though, I have to mush up a few bars into soap patties, just because I like them.  The design in the middle of the soap patties is from a cookie press.  The soap is really too stiff and waxy to take a nice impression from the cookie press, but I like it anyway.

I don't know whether the soap got so thick so quickly because of the FO, the shea butter, or the water discount.  I suspect the FO.  Next time I use it I'll need to pour at a thinner trace.

The yogurt I put in?  I was very cautious with it because milk products can cause problems with soap.  So I added only 6 T to this 5-lb batch of soap.  It wasn't enough to make a noticeable difference.  But it didn't cause any problems, either.  So next time I'll try a little more. And then a little more.  Until I get it just right.  Baby steps, baby steps!

Oh, and about the FO ... it still smells awesome!  You know, some fragrances morph or disappear in cold-process soap, so I'm always happy when I find a new fragrance that stays true.  And this one really does.

What does the FO smell like?  To me it smells like really good cold cream. Seriously.  Way back in the mists of my childhood I must have smelled a cold cream with a similar fragrance. Fortunately, this makes a great soap, too!  I'll definitely be making this one again.