June Soap Challenge Club Entry

UPDATE:  I was showing my next door neighbor my soaps from the July Challenge and I mentioned that I considered these soaps "flops". I thought they smelled bad and they're ugly.  She picked one up and said that she liked the scent so I gave her a couple of bars.  She loves them and she came over the next night after washing her face with it and she smelled great.  Go figure.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder as they say.

For the June Soap Challenge I chose to enter the Advanced category which meant I had to use a drink in place of the water in my lye solution and a food in my soap at a rate of 1 part food to 8 parts oils.  The colorants and fragrance had to be all natural as well.  I chose to use goat milk as the drink and whipped cream as the food in the hopes that my soap batter would stay white. 

First let me say I had to do a lot of experimenting to find out what didn't work.  I went to my local health food store and bought $20 worth of teas that I thought would color my soap - spirulina, hibiscus, stinging nettle, alfalfa, rose petal, and several others.  That was very time consuming because I first had to grind everything except the spirulina and sift and label them. Then I made slurries with boiling water.  I should have used a light oil. They mostly just turned the soap dull, icky colors.  They didn't smell very good either.  I also tried using an apple avocado baby food in one batch with an essential oil blend and prepared oatmeal with straight lemon essential oil in another batch.  I wasn't happy with either batch.

Last weekend I had to go out of town for a family wedding so that left me with a time crunch at the end which is the way it always seems to go for me.  I should be used to it by now!  So here's what I ended up doing:

For my fragrance I used patchouli, bergamot, cedarwood, and lavender essential oils.

For my colorants I used Purple Brazilian clay, Kaolin clay, Rose clay, and Jagua Blue extract

I'm blending the clays with distilled water

Measuring out my sodium lactate

I use lard for it's moisturizing properties and slower trace

The rest of my oils were coconut, olive, canola, sweet almond, and castor 

Here's my whipping cream. I used the 1 part to 8 parts of oils

I'm pretty experienced with whipping cream...I love whipped cream!
(Even though I'm plant based I cheat some times)

It whipped up really nice - I whipped it pretty stiff.

I had goat milk already frozen in ice cube trays at the ready.  I keep in in freezer bags so I can just pull it out when I want to use it in soap. I used goat milk 100%.

I use the standard 5% lye discount

I calculated that heavy cream is 70% water and subtracted that amount from my goat milk.  I should have had an ice water bath ready for when the lye would be melting the frozen milk extra fast, but I didn't think of that ahead of time unfortunately, and when the milk started to heat up I panicked and dumped the milk/lye solution in the oils before the lye was completely dissolved.  What a dumb thing to do! When I realized what I had done I pulled out some cheese cloth and strained the undissolved lye out of the soap.  But the milk was getting super hot and as I was squeezing the soap through the cheese cloth I could feel the heat.

Crisis is over and I'm mixing in the whipped cream.  But you can see that my soap is already a dark yellow color and the whipped cream won't do much to change it.

Colorants are mixed in and I'm attempting a Taiwan swirl.  I've never done it before, but I can already tell my soap batter is getting too thick.  Still, I hope for the best and continue on.

I filled the mold as full as I could because I know the dividers displace a lot of soap.

Taking out the first divider

Taking out the last divider

I'm dragging my stick around the edges of the mold...

Not much of a Taiwan Swirl...as I suspected the batter is too thick

I inserted my skewer all the way into the soap and made an "S" shaped design through the soap to get some kind of acceptable design.....
I then spritzed it with 91% alcohol, and I decided to insulate it and push gel phase in the hope of getting my soap hard enough to cut, plane and bevel before the deadline and also to hopefully get my colors to look good.

Miraculously, the next day when I got home from work the soap was just barely hard enough to unmold and cut

If you look closely you can see the soap looks sticky....

And there they are....they smell scorched

Two days later... hard enough to plane and bevel and the scorched smell is gone.  What does "scorched" smell like?  Did you ever have a perm?  Like that.

This was the look I was hoping for.....it's OK to laugh.