White Lines, Go Awayyyyyy

See the white line?

When I first cut this soap, I believed it was lye pieces, but couldn't understand what had happened (again). But this time, I had an inkling that it was because I hadn't completely melted my shea butter to liquid. I left a few tiny melting pods in there which I thought would just be melted by the lye chemical reaction when I poured it in. My guess at this point is that it may have caused some sort of fusion instead, especially now that I know that I wasn't stirring my palm oil and creating too much stearic acid in my soaps unknowingly.... WHO KNOWS what's going on in this bar!(?) I did the tongue test when I first cut them and I got a small zap and cut all of the white "wisps" away. Well, except for this one, because I needed to know what happens to the sucker once it starts curing.

Today, I get my pH strips out to test my soaps and I test the actual white wispy part assuming it would result in high pH levels. As you can see, I tested it and got a result of 8, which is not high.

photo courtesy of Blue Mountain Crafts

According to soap books, you want your pH levels in your soap to be between 6-10.

Then, as you can also see, I dug into the line with a tad more water and waited for a different result and I found none. I then tested it with my tongue. Minimal zap, but a zap nonetheless. I truly hate the tongue zap, and I really hate the taste of soap. :P

So the soap is the same pH level on the un-white part as it is with a fresh pH strip in the white part. Does anyone have any insight? Has this happened to you and can you share your story?

My soaps always test in at pH level of 8, so I'm starting to believe that my strips are broken or . . . what, now?

Insight would be great and sharing with newbies and me... it's good to pool our knowledge.

Because I love you guys so much, I will be doing a giveaway this week. And for the future, if there is anyone who wants to sponsor a giveaway, let me know! ;)

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I'm Mad At Titanium Dioxide

WHY?
First, we had a nice lovely discussion about Titanium Dioxide (TiO2) like adults that we are. But it did cause a raucous didn't it? By the way, TiO2 is the chemical formula and I'll be referring to it as TiO2 throughout the post.

Then, a few days later, a puff of TiO2 blows directly in my face just at the moment I inhale. (Lungs. Seized. Help.)

And then, I make Ruby Rock Star soap and decide to create a pretty swirl with some TiO2 blended soap, and {{wham!}} 24 bars are now SALE BARS because I now have some soft crumbling sides. I am convinced it's the TiO2. Why? Because the soap is great except it's falling apart. Update: I think it IS the TiO2, but it also must have been a temperature thing even though I covered my pans of soap... see?

The compromised peach sides are my problem.

Do you remember the first time titanium dioxide ruined my other Rubies? The snow on top and what was up with the center? They were pretty AND ugly all at the same time. Just like lizards!

old rubies

I think I'm done with titanium dioxide. Hmm, let me think.... are there any soaps that would suffer design -wise? Only the Raspberry Linzer Cookie and I already went darker again with that because I wanted the cookie part to look more well done from the oven.

And why attack my Ruby Rock Stars? What have they done to the TiO2 anyway?? They are sweet, like princesses, is that why you hate, TiO2? Because you don't want them to be their pretty little sparkly little things? It's always picking on Ruby. Ruby The Rock Star.

Jealous.

Left me mad one too many times. I'm done wasting my time and soap on you... Here I come with my brown and creamy hues. I'll just make it interesting for Spring....another challenge (as if I need one). The 10 years off my life when I breathed in an ounce of the stuff and then my two loaves of soap... yeah.

Damn you, TiO2

Bad Soap, Bad!

My previous post about my horrible experience with 16 pounds of failed soap made me mad and this is a follow up on what's happened since. So if you haven't read Sixteen Pounds Of Heart Breaking Soap Do-Overs Or Throw-Aways? then you might feel lost reading this.

***

My dear soap has been put to bed.

{Stupid head}

I cooked that sucker with oil and water and some coconut milk and I stirred and stirred and I stirred and it started to look like a beautiful vat of cooked fudge. My hopes got high and my spirit lifted, but the smell wasn't right... almost ammonia-ey. I tongue tested and zapped myself into oblivion.

I kept cooking added more water kept cooking. I was determined. I smushed every little soap bit into mush and I stirred and stirred and stirred.

Fudgey. Smooth. Got zapped again two hours later. You know, soap tastes revolting if you've never tasted it, I'll save you the trouble of feeling the urge to know if maybe it tastes good. Nope. This was chocolate soap and soap is soap, no matter what scent it is. I'm sure it was nice to watch me make a nasty face, spit a few times in the trash can and run over to grab a lollipop to kill the flavor. Bleh.

My arm was exhausted, my hand cramped and I even think I wrecked a nerve between my thumb and my index finger because it hurts like a MUTHA! So now I am mad at my soap.

I've learned my lesson. Don't leave lye solution out for three days and expect to make soap with it. I'm still learning.

That was just a ton of soap to learn with. I still say: BAD SOAP!

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Sixteen Pounds Of Heart Breaking Soap Do-Overs Or Throw-Aways?

I had a really busy time last week with retail orders, wholesale orders, and preparing for a my son's school craft fair fundraiser. I needed to crank out loaves of soap for a wholesale customer as well as for the shop so I prepared the lye mixtures (two sets for two 8 lb. batches) and set them aside to cool. The day I mix them went fluttering by like a turbo butterfly, as usual, and the day came to an end. I looked at the two lye mixtures and thought they'd be fine to use the next day. I've done that. It works.

Well, that very next day scurried by even faster like Runaway Ralph (a famous mouse on a motorcycle) and I had no time, not even at all, to get to making soap that day. As I was walking out of the door, I glanced at my lye solution and crossed my fingers and left for the day (the second day).

Day three: Started making soap and got to the lye solution and peered in. Hmmmmph. The solution had little shards/plates of solid lye and liquid. I figured that would all change when the lye and the oils would come together and heat up. I know, I know.... At this point, my inner lightbulb should have turned on and sparked my brain to say, "hey dummy, go make some new solution and make some great soap instead of taking a chance on 16 lbs of beautiful soap that you have made with expensive materials you've added such as babassu oil, loads of cocoa butter and kokum butter!" My reasoning? I didn't want to pour it too hot and I was scared that if I sat and waited for the lye to cool, the soap wouldn't be made again that day because of my formulating schedule.

I forced that soap to be made. I took that chance, which I happen to do with life in general, and my soap came out so beautifully. But when I went to cut it it was brittle. I did the tongue test. And I was zapped. HARD. The soap was acting as if I had added too much lye. But I didn't. I think it just didn't dissolve into the oils and there are particles floating about.

Bad soap! BAD!

C'mon. Let me blame the soap. My friend, Kim came by to chat yesterday and thankfully she chopped up two of the four loaves of soap into tiny bits while I made Coconut Milk Bath Soak. I will be cooking up that VERY BAD SOAP, adding water, stirring, adding more water today.

Are they complete piles of garbage at this point or do you all have suggestions to save these spendy loaves of soap? I think I put in 9 ounces of cocoa butter and 4 ounces of kokum butter... so I am having trouble just throwing them out.

I need your help.

Ay!

A Successful Seize

I normally purchase fragrance oils from soap suppliers that indicate whether or not the fragrance will speed up trace or will work in general with cold process soap, but a wholesale customer of mine ordered two loaves of soap in a HONEY scent, not Oatmeal Milk + Honey, so, I took a chance with a couple of fragrances I had. Let me explain.

I had Herbal Accent's Milk + Honey, Peak Candle's Wild Mountain Honey (so nice, but I would only recommend it for bath and body products and candles...you'll understand in a second), and Majestic Mountain Sage's Honey Harvest. I knew mixing the three fragrances was a red flag the minute I started. Yeah, I was flying by the seat of my pants on this one. Call me a wild card! I needed to get the soap done, I had some great fragrance oils, and I had all of my ingredients. Soooo, I thought...let's get crackin'!

Well, I poured the lye/water mixture into the oil mixture and I mixed it to trace, lalalala..happy happy joy joy, then I began to slowly pour in my fragrance mixture. I held my breath, nervous. Nervous it might turn to clumpy porridge. It seemed to be working out fine. I stirred until it was fully incorporated and I moved it over to the lined molds and saw it starting to change, but not sure how. I hurried to the molds, started pouring and as I'm pouring MID POUR, the soap batter hardened. I am talking, stopped moving mid wave. Imagine an ocean wave halting completely - freeze frame! I have NEVER had this happen before. It turned into what felt like wax! I was about to throw the whole thing out until I just thought to myself, hell, just shove that wax down into the molds and call it a day.

That I did. I shoved that waxy batter down deep with all of my weight and crossed my fingers hoping it got down deep enough to hold the shape of the mold. I was wondering if the soap would cure, if it was even soap at all! If it was soap and it did cure, would it be all crumbly and weird?

Is this what they call soap seize?

Shoot. I think I'll try to stick with fragrances that have been tried and true because it's hard to spend all that money and time on quality oil and butters and to throwing it out makes me cringe.

Update** So two days later I take out the honey wax soap out and it seems fine... Looks a bit like crumb cake. Not perfect, not perfect. I'll have to share photos next time I have access to my camera. Nice soap, too. Lathers, not harsh....smells good, too.

:) I guess you'd call it a successful seize.

Has anything like this ever happened to you before? If so, what happened to the final soap? Love to hear your experience...

Brittle Batch Memories

So after reading all of the comments you PRO SOAPERS gave me, I had a memory twang. I think I am s-l-o-w-l-y remembering what happened to my brittle batch.

Oh yes, for you all under 38 who don't have children or get migraines, you wouldn't understand how it feels to have your brain eaten.

So, this is my memory: I made two batches at the same time, so I was consistent in making exact measurements and doing it twice. This, right there is a bad idea for me because I can't multi task 20 things at once. Oh, I could make two batches at the same time, but I was also answering the phone, tending to my crock pot of Mama Bomb...and thinking about who-knows-what! So... the first batch I made was lavender. It came out beautifully with lavender essential oil (not my favorite) and did a swirl with rose clay and topped it with lavender petals and cranberry seeds. Nothing went wrong, at all with this batch. It's on my curing rack looking good and swirly, so there's that.

The second batch..... well, the oil looked great so I started to pour the lye water into it, started mixing with the stick blender, but realized that the hard oils had begun to solidify and were settling at the bottom of the bowl. What could I do at that point? I just mixed and mixed and mixed until it traced and then I pulled some out, as I had planned, added black oxide to make more swirls, poured it back to swirl with and BLAM, I got crap. So there you have it. Is it possible that it wasn't over using the lye, but mixing the lye water with the mucky muck I mixed it with? The reason I let it sit and cool off for so long was because I was working on designing and setting up my lavender batch.

I used a great fragrance oil that I've used before in my bath bombs. My shop customers LOVED the scent: black mission fig from Southern Soapers. I may have over scented the soap batch in addition to mixing lye water with muck, but now, the soap smells .... weird. I still love her scent and will continue using it in my b+b products. If anyone has made a successful batch with this fragrance, I'd love to know about it because I do not want the fragrance to be put in the same crowd as the other suspects in this investigation.

There you have it. My memory hiccup, and more information.

Any more words of wisdom?

Brittle Soap To Make The Dumpster Smelly

I read all the articles and they all tell me I put too much lye in the batch, which I didn't, but okay, whatever. I was going to rebatch the brittle nasties, but I think I'll toss them. They'll just turn gray and get ugly and I am tired of them already. I don't even like the way they smell.

So it's important to share the crap mistakes along with the pretty stuff. I learn from others when they make mistakes and hopefully you can learn from mine, even though I won't admit to this one.

I'm Getting Good At Botched Batches!

I made more crappy soap. This time I followed a recipe through MMS and their lye calculator as some of you suggested. Everything was fine until I added the fragrance oil. Instant separation. What?!?? What was happening? I had read about separation and why it occurs when the recipe is unbalanced or cools too quickly. But neither occurred. The soap mix was creamy and at a lovely trace and then, BAM! I added un-Brambleberry, untested fragrances. It was a combo of marshmallow and Honey (type). They must have been the culprit because everything was fine until then. The whole thing separated as if the fragrance oils (FOs) marched in their and broke up the kissing that was going on in the pot.

I was too mad to let it go, so I started to cook it on the stove top. I had it on low and stirred every three or four minutes, but no one was kissing again, it just got worse! They were a hateful bunch. 50% of the information I got on the internet said to throw it out, and the others said to cook the batch, pour it and see what happens. So I cooked the beasts and poured what looked like really nasty vomit into my wooden mold. The smell of the sweet fragrances gave me a whopping headache and filled my house with what smelled like a honey latte from Starbucks.

I have a new appreciation for Anne-Marie and Brambleberry, because now I understand the comments in the fragrance oil's description...such as,"accelerates trace" or "discolors cp soap to a brown"...If I had read more on soapmaking, I wouldn't have trashed all that raw material! I want to know ahead of time that the FO isn't going to turn my creamy yummy soap into a vomitous vat of waste.

I have made 4 batches. 2 flopped. That is 50% success in making soap. (I never said great soap, either, just soap). A footnote on batch #3, Elizabeth of Gracefruit gave me a tip and I turned my bad boy batch into real soap, even though lather is minimal.

A lesson is learned here (my husband's words were trying to penetrate my sad head last night). I should try to see this whole thing as a learning step. Now I know that I should pull a bit out of the original batch to scent it and hope there is no separation, or use the fragrances that have been tested by our vendors to begin with.

I have no photos for you, but hope to find my son's camera before the weekend.

It might be time to get a soap book with tried and true recipes and my own camera.

(sniff)

I Cooked The Beasts

My third attempt at making cold process soap was a total disaster, which, if you haven't read about it, you can go here to do so. Well, to make a long and boring story short, I totally screwed it up and made a quadruple superfatted soap. Aka: TRASH. Gracefruit, the queen of hot process was kind enough to give me some tips which you can read here if you want. Her suggestion was to cook it in a crock pot with some lye solution until it mixed in. So I did.


It took almost two hours with occasional stirring to mix the water into the fatty soap. It was like (duh) oil and water, but with the heat and the mixing and the time, it finally joined hands and became a mushy mess. The next morning, I am happy to announce, they hardened. Here are the freaky bad boys. They look like hard oatmeal, don't they?

I hope they are useable, because I will be doling them out to anyone who will have one. Now let's move on to other things. I'm done with these beasts.

Gracefruit, Hot Process Queen

Oh my botched batch has everyone all working in their brains to save the beasts.

Well, I asked the queen of Hot Process, Ms. Gracefruit herself. This was our conversation.



Elizabeth, I need help! Could you go to my soap blog and tell me if my botched batch is trash or can be rescued.... any words of wisdom other than I added WAY too much oil? I think I must have copied the recipe off the internet incorrectly.... me = big dummy

Thanks...humbly and sadly, Joanna
The Soap Bar
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This was her response (so sweet!)

gracefruit said...

Thanks, Joanna.

I had a look at your Bad Boy and it appears the lye discount was much too low. It looks like you've got way too much 'free' oil in the soap.

I have never tried to rescue a soap like this, and I'm not sure what the best way forward might be, but I have an idea.

You seem to be short about one ounce of lye in your recipe. Here is what I'd suggest. I've never tried this before, so I can't promise you anything, but the cost of that meadowfoam seed is making me cringe. ;) We have to try something!

I think it's time for the crock pot. Grate or chop the Bad Boy batch into tiny pieces and put it in the crock pot. Then add a solution of 1.1 oz of lye dissolved in 2 oz of water to the pot. Stir as best you can and let it cook on low heat until it's all melted. You'll want it to look like thick petroleum jelly.

My hope is that the active lye will further saponify the free oils in the soap. You'll need to be careful that no active lye is left over, though. After you've cooked the soap for about 45 minutes, do a zap test.

Take a tiny amount of soap out of the pot and let it cool, then rub it between your fingers. If it's gritty, leave it alone to cook more. If it feels waxy and smooth, tap your soapy finger to the tip of your tongue. If it doesn't 'zap', the soap is safe. If it does, you'll need to keep cooking it.

I don't know if this will work, but I think it's worth a try. Your end result soap probably won't be pretty, but it will be mild!

Please let me know how you get on. And good luck!

Elizabeth x

++++++

Can I share with you her amazing talent?? Here are some beautiful soaps she has made.....

Buttermilk and Cucumber Soap

Spiced Umeshu

Left: Rose, Right: Amberwood

Pomegranate Noir soap with black/green mica

And, of course, another talented soap maker who is across the world. She is in rural Scotland. I just need to watch to see the talent, maybe be a fly on the wall for a few days - I think I must be in the wrong place!

Botched For Sure

Yes, my bad boys will have to go now. They are not hardening. See? Maybe a batch this weekend will make it all better.

Bad Soap! Bad!

What happened? Why must you misbehave??




I have stuck you in the freezer because you were so evil. We'll see what you say then!


Batch recipe:

32 oz. H2O
11.2 lye
6 .5 oz Crisco
16 oz. Coconut oil 76 degrees
38 oz Almond Oil
4 oz. Avocado butter
29.5 oz. Meadowfoam Seed oil....any insight?