Burning Joanna

Today was the stupidest day.

Scratch that. Today I am the stupidest soap maker on the planet.

I know I had plenty of coffee but not too much too make me jittery, I don't have a head cold, I'm not on drugs, I am clear headed, and was raring to go with some major soap production this morning and - W-H-A-M-! Disaster.

I have a number of heavy duty plastic pitchers to mix my lye and water in. Well, I needed to make an extra batch, so I found a nice thick glass container I could use and I started adding my water, doo doo dooooo, then I pour in my measured lye and start stirring. Explosion. Lye water goes everywhere. Did I say everywhere? Uh-huh.

First thought, was you stupid cow, of course the heat would break it! But before that I was thinking oh, it's natural and thick and what could go wrong....with music in the background and my head all going back and forth, doo doo dooooo. Happy go lucky me. Not anymore. So my lab is like this. Formica top, shelves in front of me, but no wall, so anything that spills, goes straight down and on the floor behind it. And pools and poisons, god only knows what's behind and underneath those shelves. Nothing important, I'm thinking. Thinking too fast... clean it up, clean it up. I scream my husband's name like 5 times. Where the hell is he? He runs in barefoot. I scream GET OUT! I'm like a lunatic at this point. I have a half gallon of lye water in a pool on the counter top, dripping behind, in front of and in my cabinets....let's not even mention (no, let's) the drawers! All this time, I am thinking, cow, cow, cow. Stupid head!

Now let me say this about lye water. It does not want to be absorbed that readily. It wants to do damage. It likes to destroy. Because I normally use SO many paper towels while I make things in the soap lab and I need them to work, I can't buy the cheap crap because it's like using copy paper which is useless, I buy Bounty select-a-size. Well, my selected size today was three feet. Luckily I had kitchen gloves and my goggles on when this explosion occurred, but because it's 90+ degrees F in Florida, I was wearing a tank top and short shorts. A little lye here and a little drip there. The clean-up took me 90 minutes with two rolls of paper towels and a bottle of vinegar. I also had a huge sink load of stuff I had to sanitize because lye water got on them.

So AFTER the clean-up, I needed to get the lye burns off of me. No direct splash, which I'm thrilled about, but I felt little stings all over, like a little drip got here there and as I was cleaning up perhaps and drip got back there , oh and there.... dreadful morning to say the LEAST.

After my shower and utter disgust with the whole thing, I went to one of the super mega shops and got myself three more super duper plastic pitchers for mixing my lye and water. No more glass. If you didn't get this great piece of knowledge from my story: Do not mix lye and water in a glass container, no matter how politically correct and non-plastic-ey you are. Be safe and don't put everyone and everything at risk for chemical burns. What a horror.

Damage to items that got touched by the lye:

1. Laminate counter top got a few raised lesions.
2. Hand blender's cord got a superficial burn. A brown mark.
3. Me. A few superficial chemical burns (it has been my week for chemical burns).
4. Scale has some visual marks...can't read any of the buttons and the tare button doesn't work, but the scale still works! Need a new one.
   

Later in the afternoon, I go back to making soap. I have my lye mixtures ready for me from before my accidental glass breakage situation, I get my oils weighed and ready to go. I make my first batch of Orange Lemongrass soap. Ahhh, success. I get my second batch ready to start, pour my lye mixture into the oils, and just when it usually goes to trace I pour my fragrance in, but then I notice that it looks really white and it doesn't seem to be going to trace. Hmmm. Straaaaannge.... Getting nervous because this has never happened to me before. I keep blending, and blending, and stirring and blending, and then it occurred to me that maybe I never put lye in that batch of water. Oh lordie! I took my glove off, dipped my finger in the pitcher to see if my finger starts to burn (what?! I had been burned so much already, how brave is that really? Not.) Then, since it didn't burn, I licked it. Nothing. I just poured water into oils and fragrance and now what? More mistakes, what?!

So thinking quickly on my feet, I thought to add another batch into this one, but add 3x the lye amount. I certainly thought it would work. Why not? Seems logical to me, doesn't it? I had 2 batches in that one and was adding one more. That makes 3! Well, the chemical reaction it created made it sort of lumpy and then it turned pasty. Then I thought I'd just fill a wooden mold to see how it would come out. And within 3 minutes that soap turned into a volcano. That was crazy. My husband came in and asked me why I was baking bread in the soap molds (ha ha, not funny).

All that soap is now in a crock pot, hopefully turning into hot process soap. I don't have crazy notions that the soap will end up okay, but I am hoping for it. I need a little magic.

I'm a bit grumpy right now. And stingy. And more grumpy because I can't stand the words, "Mom, I'm bored, what am I supposed to do?" It's summer vacation, go find friends and figure it out. My son has camp for the last 3 weeks of the summer. He's going to kill me if the first 8 weeks will be like this.

Yesterday, my daughter got sunburned so she asked me to buy her an XL soft shirt from Walmart, and I did. Just now she walked in with the shirt. She cut it all up to make it like the old movie, Flashdance, and cut the bottom, too.

I'm burning now in more then a few places.

Get me out of here.

I'm done soaping for the day, too.