3rd CP batch (with a friend!)

My friend, Katie, came over to play with me and my son today :) Somehow I roped her into trying out a batch of CP with me :) She decided to try out some Chai Tea scented soap, and I wanted to try out a soap using shortening that I had picked up yesterday.

This is the recipe:
Walmart GV Shortening (all-vegetable) 9 oz
Sunflower Oil 6 oz
Olive Oil pomace 3 oz
Coconut Oil, 76 deg 9 oz
Castor Oil 3 oz

Got all our supplies ready:


And started getting to work!


That's a proud Katie with her finished soap (this was her first time soaping!)

And here's a closeup of the soap before we ruined it in the oven, lol:


We popped it in the oven to do CPOP and it ended up overheating within 20 minutes! Gasp! No! I checked in on it and it had bloated up kind of like an air mattress :(


Luckily I caught it before it could do anything really bad, like explode in the oven sending soap all over the place! So, I turned the oven off and let it cool down in there. Eventually it evened out in its bloated state before settling down. And now it has this weird texture on top that we're probably going to cut off later down the road if it still turns out to be usable >_< Haha! Adventures in soaping, truly!



I can't wait to be able to cut this and see if it's alright or if it separated under that weird layer there...

I also have the results from my Pringles can molds. The top row of soap is from the can that I had left on my counter, covered with towels. It turned this icky green color :( And you see the ones with the large hole in the middle. I was expecting there to be a lye liquid inside (means a botched batch of soap) but it was dry and no liquid was inside, yay! They aren't round either :( It looks like a LOT of air got trapped in that can (it was the second to be poured so it was slightly thicker than the first can...
The bottom row is the soap I had placed in the refrigerator. It kept its original color from when I poured and you can still see the pink swirls in it. I probably should have waited a day longer to unmold this one because one side flattened a bit as I was cutting it.


I do notice that the set I had put in the fridge has a much stronger scent than the one I left on the counter...

After all these, I think I'm preferring the non-gelled soaps a bit more, so I might be keeping my soaps cold for a couple more tries :)

Sudsy Sunday - Second CP Batch

Hey guys- looky, two posts today! (Well, kinda, it's now midnight here...) Anyway, I managed to find some time to try another CP batch. Not sure how this one is going to turn out and I already don't like it because I used my least favorite scent in it (what better way to test out CP than with a scent you don't like ^_^;;). So, I'll start you off with my recipe:
Coconut Oil, 76 deg 11.2 oz
Olive Oil pomace 6.4 oz
Sunflower Oil 6.4 oz
Olive Oil 3.2 oz
Castor Oil 4.8 oz
teeny tiny bit of Berrywine FO (it just smells too much like wine for my taste, though I know other people really enjoy the smell).

The reason why I have the pomace and regular olive oil is because my regular olive oil is green, I have a lot more of it than the pomace but I didn't want my batch to have a green tint to it.

My mold: two Pringles cans, woot! Gonna try them out today.

I mixed my lye water and got my oils ready and didn't overheat them this time! Yay! Learning from mistakes is fun ^_^

So here I've poured my lye water into my oils already and I wanted to show you what saponification looks like (if you haven't seen it already). Sorry for not speaking throughout the video- I was concentrating on holding the camera steady with one hand and using the mixer with the other hand >_< That's also why I was being so timid with the mixing and why I put the camera down once it started to get thicker. I needed my camera hand to hold onto my bowl and get the rest of the oils hanging out on top mixed in.



So, I didn't get any pictures after this because I accidentally blended too long and got to a medium trace (decently thick) and since I was planning to swirl, I needed to work fast. I scented with Berrywine and spoon mixed the scent in, then separated out a little bit of the soap into another bowl and tried coloring it with some red liquid colorant, but I don't think CP soap likes liquid colorant. Instead of getting a smooth consistency of color the color seemed to turn into little granules mixed in around the soap. I don't know how to describe it... anyway, I was going for a pinky color... the other part I tried for a purple color, but it didn't take so well, either... I did the in-the-pot swirl technique where you pour the smaller amount of colored soap back into the big pot of soap and stir it once around with a spoon before you pour into the mold. Placed my Pringles cans in the sink and poured the soap in.

My camera really pooped out on me when I tried taking a picture of the swirled soap, so this is the best picture I have to show. You can kind of see the pink swirl in there...



Well, this recipe (total weight came to be just under three pounds) filled 1 1/2 Pringles cans. So, one is sitting on my counter away from prying little fingers covered with some Cling wrap and two towels. The other one is actually sitting in my refrigerator. Someone said you can put soap in the fridge to keep it from gelling (not necessarily a good or bad thing). So, in a couple of days, I'll rip them out of their molds and show you what they look like cut!

Cleaning Weekend!

Hey guys- Sorry about not posting yesterday, but I have decided that this long weekend is cleaning weekend! The entire house is getting done over and I may even be breaking out an old toothbrush to do some scrubbing, too >_< If I feel like taking a break later tonight after lil' bubba has gone to bed I'll see about making another batch of soap and actually remember to put a memory card in my camera to take my pictures :)
Wish me luck and hopefully I'll get to a place where I can do some soapy craftiness!

Fiber Friday - Combining days

So... once again I missed out on Trinket Thursday... I had a pounding headache all day and thankfully today, it has disappeared! Anyway, I thought maybe I could make up for it by combining Trinket Thursday and Fiber Friday by inundating you all with some Fiber Jewelry!
Just like any other jewelry style, fiber jewelry is made with all sorts of different fibers: fabric, yarn, thread, natural and synthetic fibers... and comes in all sizes. I'm not one for the really large style jewelry so a lot of what I will show is more along the lines of things I like... simple, elegant, small, with just a slight bit of spunk added in the mix! I'm being a little lazy at the moment and will probably come back to edit this post later tonight, but I invite you to visit my Fiber Jewelry board over at Pinterest to see all the loverly jewelry :) Plus, more will be added in the future!

And then, of course, the obligatory update of the Tom Baker Dr. Who Scarf ^_^

Currently sitting at 2'2" and 227/1042 rows which is about 22% done. This is going to take over a month to complete >_< And I think I made it a bit too wide (it's 55 stitches wide... probably should have made it more around 40 stitches wide) but I've put so many hours into it, I think I would cry if I frogged it and started all over... herm

Whimsy Wednesdays - My soaping results!

Hi all! I woke up this morning and checked in on the soap I made yesterday ^_^ So I thought I share with you the results!

Mmm... brownies.... they smell soooo good!
no... wait... that's my soap!

I was hard and slippery to the touch so I tried to unmold it and it was sticky wherever the sides touched the mold. It was a bit difficult, but I persevered! I just wanted to show you what the bottom side looked like...

...not very much like soap, which had me kind of worried if the inside looked all crystally, too!

Nope! The inside looks like soap! yay! And to prove that it is truly some kind of soap, here's a picture of my mold after I ran water into it:

Why, are those bubbles I'm seeing?

So, thank you for taking a gander at my first ever from-scratch soap ^_^ And I think this one will be called something like "Her-She's Got Almonds!" (if you're just now joining us, I invite you to go read yesterday's blog; but I will tell/remind all you that I had used Hershey's cocoa powder and some almond fragrance, thinking on the chocolate almond bars that are pretty tasty out on the market. Get the name now? Hehe!) Now I shall let it sit on the rack for a couple of weeks to get harder and ready to use! ^_^

Tutorial Tuesday - A change in events

Hi all! I sat down to my computer today to actually share with you my first attempt at Cold Process Oven Process soap! I was so excited because I managed to juggle taking pictures at the same time :D ...only to find out that I didn't have the memory card in the camera... the camera I have doesn't have any memory on its own so all those lovely and wonderful step-by-step pictures are actually non-existent! Oh the horror!
I did, however, manage to snap one picture of my soap while it is now sitting in its comfy oven blanket, so here's a sneak peak of my first ever made-from-scratch soap!


Let's see... I used this recipe:
8 oz. Coconut oil
6 oz. Olive oil
4 oz. Castor oil
2 oz. Sunflower oil

It's not going to be a very hard bar of soap, but I didn't have any of the harder butters on hand and went with what I had. According to SoapCalc, my soap should have:
Hardness (29-54): 38
Cleansing (12-22): 27
Conditioning (44-69): 57
Bubbly (14-46): 45
Creamy (16-48): 29
Iodine (not actual iodine, it stands for something in how the chemicals get bonded together) (41-70): 60
INS (136-165): 160

I must thank Emily Shieh today for helping me get the last minute questions and answers before I began!

So, unto story time. I cleaned my kitchen, yay! Then I prepared my lye/water mixture outside because my house doesn't ventilate very well. I like the lye that I used because it was in crystal form and didn't get all static on me. While I waited for my lye to cool down, I prepared my oils and got them heating up while I also prepared my fragrance and colors. I used .75 oz. of Brambleberry's Chocolate Espresso fragrance mixed with some Cappuccino Mica and actual Hershey's cocoa powder for one section of the soap and .5 oz. of Brambleberry's Almond fragrance with some titanium dioxide (white) for a different section of soap.I found out that I need to watch my oils a bit more closely >_< They got up to around 150 degrees F and I had to stir for a long time to get them cool enough to soap with. I'm really hoping that doesn't affect the final outcome of my soap *fingers crossed* No dreaded orange spots please! Please!

But once that was done, I added my lye to the oil and stirred it in with a spoon first then used my brand new hand blender to blend the concoction together. And wow! It was really cool to see the green-tinted oils turn off-white in a matter of seconds! Saponification is a cool process to watch :D I got a light trace in about 5 minutes so I separated the batch into two bowls and mixed one with the brown fragrance/colorant and the other one with the white fragrance/colorant. I tried to get a nice swirl in the soap, but that didn't want to happen (I made too much of the white for what I was going for). Anyway, now it is all sitting in my oven until tomorrow when I can take it out and cut it up! I'm praying it won't separate on me during the night, 'cause that would just suck! But being my first batch ever and I'm not technically following all the soap-making rules, I wouldn't be upset if it did happen. It's all a learning process, you know?

I am going to go enjoy the smell of chocolate wafting through my house now and I hope you got at least a little chuckle from my escapade ^_^ And for those of you in tornado alley, I hope you make it through the storm safe and sound!

Muse Monday - Nature's Color Theory

I love going to the flower gardens! All the pretty colors and scents just put me in a great mood. I find it fascinating how nature can come up with her color pallets for her plants. I hope you'll be able to get some inspiration for playing with colors in whatever you create ^_^