The Tom Baker Scarf is Complete!

So, about two months ago I had started work on the infamous Tom Baker Dr. Who scarf. I finally finished it last Thursday! Woot!
So, here are a couple of pictures for you :)

This thing was monstrous at 10 feet 10 inches (including the fringe) and 12 inches wide! Nearly swallowed my son whole!

But my friend love love loved it- as if you couldn't tell by the cheesy happy grin on his face! He even did his happy dance for me- which, with the fringe flying everywhere was vaguely reminiscent of a burlesque feather dance, hehe. That boy can really wiggle!


So, let's get some specs out there:
Yarn: 7 skeins of I Love This Yarn brand in 7 colors
Needles: size 8 (5.0mm)
Finished size: 10'10" (including fringe) and 12" wide- I was so happy that this came out to the correct size!
Number of stitches: 57,365; 1043 rows (includes bind-off row) x 55 stitches
Time: Just under 2 months; approximately 3-5 hours/night - This was approximately: The entire series of Scrubs, Lie to Me, Season 2 of Glee, Season 5 of Dr. Who, a couple of random movies, half of 10 Things I Hate About You (tv show), Season 1 of Numb3rs, and some other shows that I know I watched during this endeavor!

Mmm... Iced Green Tea

So, today I was inspired by a post I found over at SoapQueen.com for a Chai Latte Soap. Those little cups o' tea were so cute and while they used CP over there, I used a little bit of my remaining M&P soap to create a different version.


It looks so nice, cool, and refreshing don't you think? Made with BB Clear Base with some Sunflower oil added to it (I find the Clear base needing extra moisturizing power) and just a little bit of Green Tea Extract (yay! for anti-oxidants!). I made ice cubes with no color and scented strictly with Green Tea FO and then the “liquid part” also has Matcha Tea FO in it (it’s got a more floral and fruity scent to it, even though it is a green tea in it’s own right) and has a little bit of green pigment and cappuccino mica for coloring.
These soaps are a huge 10.5 ounces! Wow! (I just weighed them to add the info and I am surprised they’re that huge!)
So one last picture so you can hopefully see the icecubes better!

Stay cool everyone!

The Great Goats Milk Experiment!

Hey everyone! I know I haven't been updating like I've been wanting to but have no fear, I have been working on several projects recently and they will get posted in time (hopefully sooner than later).

I did want to share with you today an experiment in Goats Milk soap that I conducted late last week. I had been curious as to why CP soapers would add Goats Milk into their soaps but I also have been reading that the Goats Milk can be extremely tricky to work with because it tends to overheat (when it overheats, it turns orange in appearance).

I did 3 one-pound of oils batches and used varying amounts of Goats Milk as part of the water content for making the lye solution.

My recipe:
Olive Oil: 40%
Walmart GV Shortening: 40%
Coconut Oil: 15%
Castor Oil: 5%

Liquid content was at 38%

All three batches:


The first batch I made was the green soap. I scented it with Green Tea FO. I used 30% water to dissolve the lye and added 8% cold Goats Milk (I froze it and then took it out of the freezer when I started heating the oils and mixing the lye) at trace. It's colored with a little bit of Green powdered oxide. I also tried the method where the FO and colorant were added to the oils and mixed before adding the lye mixture. After pouring it into my Pringles can mold, it went into the refrigerator for 48 hours.
I don't know why, but a couple hours after I had unmolded it cracks developed on the surface :( I don't know if you can really see that in this picture. But this is the only soap that cracked out of the three batches.


My second batch was half water and half goats milk content. I dissolved as much lye as I could in the water, then added the goats milk (frozen) and finished adding the rest of the lye. The Goats Milk did burn and turned a bright orange color while I was waiting for the oils to cool down. Into my oils went a little bit of yellow powdered oxide and Energy FO. This, too, went into a Pringles can and into the refrigerator for 48 hours.

It turned a lovely yellow orange on me ^_^

My third batch was 100% goats milk for my liquid content. It took absolutely forever for the lye to dissolve in the frozen goats milk, and though the goats milk was frozen and I had the lye mixing container in an ice bath, as soon as the lye touched the goats milk, it turned orange. However, this didn't really do anything to the final outcome of the soap as it merely turned a very light tan/cream color! This batch was made without any colorant and Yuzu FO and once again, I used a Pringles can mold and it went straight into the refrigerator for 48 hours. When I first cut into this soap, it was a consistent color all the way through- I was excited! Then the next day I noticed that there was some discoloration in the middle of some of the pieces (boo!). If I try this again, I will place the soap back into the refrigerator after cutting- maybe that will keep the soap from heating up too much and turning orange?


So, yesterday I did the zap test on the soap (basically, you lick the soap to see if it "zaps" you and if it does, there is still active lye in the soap) and had no zap... sheesh... I'm a soap licker now! Hehe! Anyway, since I got no zap, I decided to do a quick test on how the soaps felt.


The Green Tea soap:
Dry, it felt kind of rough, like my usual batches do at first...


The Energy soap:
Dry, this one felt a little smoother than the Green Tea, but not by much.


The Yuzu soap:
Dry- ooh creamy! Kind of like the way commercial soaps feel when dry (but in my mind, I know this bar is actually a lot healthier for my skin). If I had the patience to do all Goats Milk in the future, I probably would be doing this all the time!

Another observation I made with the dry soap is that the soaps with the higher goats milk content feel a lot harder... I can feel some give in the Green Tea soap when I put a squeezing pressure on the middle, but no give in the Yuzu soap whatsoever.

All the soaps when wet:
When I went to wash with each soap, it was difficult to get a lather and the lather was rather slimy and ick-feeling. (I should have expected this, though, with how low a "bubbly" factor it got on the soap calculator). It also felt like it wouldn't wash off and left my skin feeling kind of sticky. So, I went online to see what was up and found out that soaps with high Olive Oil content get more of a slime lather and guess what! The Goats Milk also adds a bit of its own sliminess, too! So, I guess I should have done a little bit more research on how the oils react when used as soap :( I was also advised to let the soap cure a little bit longer and then try washing with them again to see if any of the slimy lather goes away. So, I shall update on the Great Goats Milk Experiment in a month and see how the soaps feel when used at that time! Otherwise, I have a feeling that these soaps will be going into my first ever rebatch experiment! LOL! Gotta learn how to rebatch at some point in time!

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