Saponification Sunday...Sad State of Soap

So not to be copying Jen http://jenorasoaps.blogspot.com/ but seems I got carried away with water discounting as well. But before I go further, let me say how much I appreciate when soap folks who d share mistakes as well as earth shattering accomplishments. It takes a special soaper like Jen to say "Hey...DON"T do this! "  Of course I ignored her advice being of the dull witted variety, but still I appreciate that she tried to warn me.  Maybe you will be smarter than I

So I made a beautiful smelling soap  all full of clove and cassia essential oils.  Wafting with the aroma of freshly baked coffee cake and hot brewed Java, it also looked wonderful as I colored with real Folgers, none of that ridiculous what-is-the-point decaffeinated junk, and some coffee butter which is a deep rich brown.  Just before pouring in the mold I stitrred in  a brief teaspoon of the coffee grounds themselves and it all looked heavenly after sitting in the frig for 24 hrs.

Yeah, it looked wonderful until  I began cutting it into bars...It all came apart at the seams it seems. At first slice it went well but as I got closer to the bottom, the bottom lost it, crumbling to the floor.  DANG IT !

So I got a thinner knife which helped some but a few hours later obnoxious fissures started showing up throughout the bar. Right about the same time the bottom half was darkening into a rich brown, which made me see the potential and grieve its loss even more.

I really liked the way my swirls worked after stabbing the soap with a small whisk a few times. But alas it will not work for resale. So, I will grate it and rebatch it, another lesson learned.

ALWAYS DOUBLE CHECK THE RECIPE AGAINST THE LYE CALCULATOR

The bowl? Got it for 99cents at my favorite thrift shop, Frugality, in Fairbury, Illinois. On the bottom it says FRANKOMA. Name of potter? Who knows. Still a cool bowl

Saponification Sunday

Yes, I am aware I did not talk about soap last Sunday. Now what was the reason ? Oh yeah, Christmas but hey, no more slacking off for this gal. Today is Sunday and therefore we talk about the soap, until I forget the next time. There's a 50/50 chance.

This weeks cold process creation colored
with maddor root powder, scented with Frankincense
Essential Oil which is very weird and yet likeable

Decisions are being made on this first day of the year, important and earth shattering ones...there will be no further advancement of my soap business at this time. How's that for definately indefinate? With all that is going on farm wise my soap shall remain ETSY-less, EBAY-less and ON-Line Store-less.

Made with Coconut, Babassu, Olive, Sunflower
and Castor Oils, it stacks well don't you think?

Instead I will sell it only in my own little farm store and to the folk who ask for the occasional bars after reading my blog. Oh, and my hard core repeat buying soap customers Jean, Shannon, Wayne and Vickie. And those sisters of mine and their female offspring and my daughter, her daughters and of course the daughter-in-laws. Not to mention, but I must, my mail lady, and the owners of the  two small nearby antigue stores but I won't be refilling those...well unless I change my mind...you know like if they beg me or something.

Dipped in Pink Himalayan Salts and
Epsom Salt Crystals, my homemade bath salts.

Does that make my soap very exclusive ? Naaaaaa. It just illumintes the slothfullness  of the soap maker. Or maybe, just maybe a tired farmwife who is finally admitting she has limits. We're funny that way are we not? Insisting on doing  EVERYTHING and then getting mad when EVERYTHING doesn't get done; but I regress.

Hot Process Crock Pot Soap created
from 4 different  Cold Process bars.

But lest you fret, Saponification Sunday will continue as soap is fun and I am in need of more levity in my life right now and besides, the last thing I need is the law firm of Cro, Cocobong and Cro showing up at my door demanding their blog money refunded.

Scented with Lavender, Lemongrass, Sweet Orange
and Bergamot. You say Pychotic, I say Eclectic

Saponification Sunday

Soap making has become my all time stress reducer, next to reading, writing, horseback riding, Aiden Quinn watching, road tripping to the Windy City, spending a long vacation in a rental cottage in County Clare,gardening, and....that about covers it I guess.

 I make it when I am all alone, the lights are low (in the living room they are low because I am in the kitchen. Of course they are not low in the kitchen I am working with highly caustic lye. Lets be reasonable shall we?) and the music is relaxing. George Winston or John Denver , maybe even Tracey Chapman if I am feeling really hopeless in a relaxing sort of way. I also do it late at night as I don't like to be interrupted when I am in my creative mode trying to decide if it is Babassu I am feeling or am I just in a plain old Coconut Oil mood?

But the point is, soap making is for me, and me alone and I enjoy it immensely.  But I do run hot and cold when it comes to saponification methods. For instance I've been on a recent hot process kick. Sometimes I just like to see things boil over, besides me that is.  I colored this batch of hot process soap with Spirulina powder found at the Naturally Yours grocery in Normal, Illinois. Spirulina is a free-floating filamentous cyanobacteria characterized by cylindrical, multicellular trichomes in an open left-hand helix. (As opposed to a right hand helix don't cha know)

They occur naturally in tropical and subtropical lakes with high pH and high concentrations of carbonate and bicarbonate.  They occur in Africa, Asia and South America, then they hitch a ride to Central Illinois. Why anything would leave the warmth of Africa for the frosty heartland in December is beyond me.

It is a blue green algae and contains loads of protein, vitamins, minerals and amino acids. People even eat it. In the bag it is a very dark spinach green color .A hint of blue may be seen when the soap is first cut into bars, but that hint of blue quickly disappears. What you end up with is green soap, sometimes light sometimes dark. And the green color of the spirulina seems to last a very long time. This batch was extremely dense and hard and bubbles up nicely due to the Castor oil I am a fan of. Funny how before I was a partisan soap maker I never imagined Castor Oil had any pleasant uses.

Spirulina cost a little more than other herbs or plant material that produce a green in soap, but considering the color you can get from a very small amount, and the length of time the color lasts, it’s well worth the price. For this batch I only needed 1 teaspoon of the powder for the 36 ounces of oil in my recipe. At about $4 an ounce you can color quite a few bars without much pocket book pain. ("pocket book"? How old am I for Pete's sake? Oh about 100 since I said "Pete's Sake")

Soapy Sunday

Been blogging for 2 and 1/2 years and still terribly unstructured in my posts. But not anymore. From here on out SUNDAY will be Soapy Sunday. No, it will not include bathing of farm animals, nor is it a reference to cleaning my house. That project is so past saving, why bother ? Today I noticed a toothbrush on the floor of our bathroom, in the corner, under a protective cover of spider webs. This means that not only is the house dirty...but someone has not bothered to brush their teeth for awhile. You think YOU are grossed out ?!?

Thus Soapy Sunday can only refer to the act of saponification. Oh how I love that word. If you want to love that word too then you must memorize the following definition. Or not. Just skip to the pictures if you refuse to expand your medulla oblongata.

Saponification is a process that produces soap, usually from fats and lye. In technical terms, saponification involves base (usually caustic soda NaOH) hydrolysis of triglycerides, which are esters of fatty acids, to form the sodium salt of a carboxylate. In addition to soap, such traditional saponification processes produces glycerol. "Saponifiable substances" are those that can be converted into soap.^[1]

^{With Christmas rapidly approaching and several requests for soaps to give as gifts I have turned to hot process to beef up my store stock. The main reason I like HP is you have to really SLAM the mold on the counter very hard to get the soap well packed. I can't help it. It just feels good to SLAM something once in awhile. I was going to call this soap "Christmas Tree" as I used wheat grass powder for the green color and thought I'd get this nice snow on a Evergreen Effect with some titanium dioxide for the top layer.}

^{Apparently I was too stingy with the wheat grass powder. But then I saw something else. A lovely sea green effect. And those waves ! In one bar I swear I saw the image of a sailboat. Maybe you'll see it too. Look closely, its a little hard to make out.}

Did you see it ? Cool huh ?

After studying these bars more closely...

Its obvious that "Christmas Tree" doesn't work even though I scented with a fun combo of Pine, Cedar wood, Blood Orange and Eucalyptus essential oils. Instead I'm thinking of something more like "Celtic Sea Waves of  a Benumbing Winter Morn Crashing onto the Shores of Kinvara Bay"

What do you think?

Kit Kat Soap



Its a temporary name, until I can think of something more artistic or dare I say it , sculptural ?
Anyway, its soap. You probably thought I'd given up my saponifaction habit since I've been yakking about non-sudsing topics so much of late, but taint true. I've just slowed a little due to all the other details of my life. But I must get cracking again as our farm store customers are buying up my soap faster and faster each week. Yesterday one fabulous chick bought SEVEN bars ! (Thank you DN. Thank you very much!)

I have this feeling that one day Keith will die and I will find 3000 bars of my soap hidden away in the barn after he bought it all  back from the people he PAID to buy it from me. He's nice that way.

I love how natural powders, clays, roots, herbs, flowers never come out the same no matter
how many times you color with them. Or perhaps it has more to do with my "technique."

This here soap bar was great fun. Created with palm, coconut, olive, canola oils and mango butter the lighter orange/yellow color comes from Annato seed powder. Another wild experiment in the all natural coloring arena as well as the embed improvisations. I started pouring this soap AND THEN decided to cut up a hot process bar that smelled great (Cassia essential oil) but was so dull looking after being colored with Clove powder. Shoving two long bars of the HP soap into the cold process soap and then pouring more CP in the mold and I got this Kit Kat bar thingy.

Or maybe you are thinking piano keys...as they would look through the eyes of the totally inebriated. Either way I scented the CP with clove and blood orange essential oils and when mixed with the cassia of the HP embeds, the bar smells good enough to serve for dessert. Which is exactly what happened in my sons house.

I gave him a bar of this for his 30th birthday, just what every 30 year old man wants for that special day and  his little dog Abby became interested jumping up on my sons leg. So he lowered the soap bar down for her to smell and she of course BIT into the bar. So much for not testing my products on animals. Her face afterwards was pretty funny. Of course she suffered no ill effects as the bar was free of all chemicals and dyes. Funny dang dog..