Soap Experiments!

Let's start by seeing my handsome kitty!

Well, I've finally had the time to play with soap making!  (I've been dying to try starting it, but have been insanely busy again)  I haven't played with anything soap in....a little over three years?  Even back then, I really only played with the melt and pour kinds.  At least I was good at fragrance mixing!  Well, do I ever start anything the easy way?

A pretty green for the turtle and frog molds I have.

To start with, and to get back in the basic understanding, I got some melt and pour kits to experiment with.  Of course it was a BLAST!  Who doesn't love mixing smell goods and pretty colors together?  I did a couple of small hand soap batches with this and I was ready to start the "fun game.

Pouring melt and pour soap into molds.

After "playing" I decided it was time to get on to the real game.  Mike had picked up a book a while back  (I will choose not to name the book just yet.  I would like to give it another shot first!) and we already had been collecting the ingredients.  I have a friend who has some pretty bad skin allergies.  It really touched my heart that she hadn't really been able to have the experience of funky colored/scented soaps because of it!  So, I made it my mission to keep my soap artificial dye and color free for her sake (so she can use some fun soap)!  I did a fair deal of research and decided to add cocoa powder to the recipe as both my dye and coloration.  To use this as a dye, it is recomended (as far as I my research told me online) that you heat your liquid oil up slightly with the cocoa in it to help the color take more evenly.  Most places also recommended that you filter the cocoa powder out to prevent a grainy scrubby feeling soap.  I knew that I didn't really want a dark brown soap for my first try, so I wasn't worried about filtering (plus, a little "scrub" in soap isn't normally a bad thing in my opinion).

The beginning stages of fixing the soap.

To make a long story short:  soap making is harder than I (or my silly book) gave it credit for.  I ended up with a giant mess that was completely separated after a few hours of sitting in it's mold.  Not only were we bummed, but we also had a giant mess on our hands at midnight.  Now, I guess I should mention here that we did this the night before the repeat house inspection for our rental.  It worked out so that we had a bit of time while straightening up that we hadn't planned for and we really needed a break/distraction from our inner mind workings.  As this project began to flounder, we started feeling the time pressure of fixing it quickly so we could get on with the things that had to be done before morning.  A word of advise folks:  unless you've done the project thousands of times (and even then something could always go wrong) I'd recommend making sure that you will have plenty of stress free time for it in case you make a mistake.  I have a couple of ideas personally of what went wrong, but I can't say anything for sure since it was my first ever batch from scratch.  (Another word for the wise here.  Wear a mask, a bandanna, something across your nose and mouth.  I can't stress this enough.  After spending an hour worrying I was going to die, I realized that I hadn't inhaled enough of the lye vapors by accident to really be dangerous.  No mater how careful you normally are, you're going to forget or get in a rush or just do something silly at some point.  My book did not stress this enough.  It actually barely mentioned it!)

Ready to pour repaired soap!

Now, back to the story!  I sat down at my computer to try and quickly figure out what had gone wrong!  Thank goodness I found Soap Queen's Amazing Soap Saving Tutorial!  With her help, I was able to take the "wounded" first batch and repair it into something usable.  I won't go into all the details (because I really want to encourage you to look at her site because it's awesome!), but her explanations were easy to follow and left me feeling more secure (and less bummed) about my first try.  Now, the original soap mess didn't really pull any of the scent of the cocoa powder like I had hoped.  Going through her tutorial, however, really brought out a lot of the fragrance and color!  While heating my soap up to reprocess it, my house smelt of baking brownies!  To be honest, I think this cheered me up more than anything at this point!  Once my soap had a cake batter ish look to it (well it smelt and looked like brownies so how would you describe it?) we began the (late) process of planning what to put it into.  Since the original recipe we were using didn't need to be poured at a high temperature, we had just planned on using some old Tupperware we have (and I mean five years old stuff) and just using it until it died to make a mold for cutting bar soap.  After our experiences thus far, we took Soap Queen serious when she said the mixture would be hot (even if it is deceivingly fluffy looking).

Cooling soap.  I was really tempted to put a CAUTION: Not Brownies sign on it.

We ended up using a glass casserole dish of mine that Mike ran under hot water before hand to try and reduce any risk of it cracking on us.  I knew that the shape of these first bars wouldn't be as pretty as I had originally wanted, but I was just excited that I would still have soap at the end of it all.  (For the record, from what I've read, as long as you wash your pans really well, (and multiple times) using them for cooking and soap making isn't harmful.  Just be careful and make sure you get things really clean!)  After 24 hours, the soap was hard enough to cut.  What was the first thing I tried?  I tried melting a small piece in the microwave to see if I could then pour it into a mold to get the "pretty shape".  It didn't work.  It keeps that fluffy texture and heats up quickly.  After that one attempt, I accepted that this was the shape my soap was going to be and cut it into bars.  After cutting the first few bars I realized how beautiful the soap actually was!  The chocolate smell isn't really strong in the finished product, but it gave it a natural swirl look.  I think I will purposely "ruin" this soap each time I make it (and by this soap I mean when I use cocoa like this if my friend likes it) to get this result.  Now, I will be getting a casserole dish I can dedicate to soap making only use as well!  (I really want a square one, but you make do with what you make do with.)  I've got it air drying out on a cookie sheet so I'm sure it will be mentioned in a future post again with the final results.  For now, look at how pretty it is now!

An over sized picture to show the pretty look of this soap!