I have a very good friend who's been teaching me to make soap. We usually do it at her house across town because it's just more fun with a friend! She's in the process of moving so on Saturday we decided to soap all day and try to use up the rest of her supplies so she doesn't have so much to move. That was her excuse....like we needed one, right? First we grated the rest of the Castile soap we made a couple months ago and make laundry soap and some liquid soap.
Since she's moving I decided to make my next batch of goat milk soap all by myself. We've always tag teamed it with one of us melting the oils and one mixing the lye so I wanted to do it all to get used to the timing by myself. On top of that I had gotten a free sample of some grape purple oxide and some TD so I wanted to do a white and purple spoon swirl. Now, being new to all this I've read so much from so many places my brain is full of soapy stuff with no memory of where I read what. I had it in my brain that I needed 1 tsp of colorant ppo, so for my recipe I needed 3 tsp of color. So following a video I had seen recently, got 3 small cups with 1 Tbl of glycerine in each. I then mixed 1 tsp TD in one, and 1 tsp grape in each of the other 2 and mixed it well with my nifty little mini mixer. It was so pretty! When the soap got to a light trace, I seperated it into 3 equal bowls, added the colors and mixed well with a whisk then the SB. So good so far except....it wasn't purple! It was a really intense dark blue...kinda like blueberries! I had intended to layer it purple, white, purple but for some reason added the white first. So it ended up white, purple, purple. I did the spoon swirl thing and was so proud of myself...it looked great! So into the oven while we took a break and started the clean up and visiting. After a couple of hours I needed to get home. Ooh look...it's changing colors! Now it looks like raspberries!
This is the second time I've used the 5lb loaf mold so I didn't think anything about moving it, it was OK the last time! Of course, last time I moved it it had been set up about 4 hours. Sure enough when I put it on the floor of my truck I noticed some movement. I was thinking I sure hope I didn't have to slam on my brakes! Well, it didn't take slamming on the brakes, just your normal slowly stopping and going around curves does some strange sloshing in a loaf mold! As I watched the top of that loaf undulate and finally slop over the edge a bit, I could just imagine what it was going to look like. On top of being so dark as to look almost black instead of a nice medium blue/purple.
As I unmolded it on Sunday I was surprised to see some definite streaks so was still hopeful that maybe a bar or two would look OK, even if the top was a bit caved in along the middle. I sliced it today and was really pleasantly surprised, I had swirls...of sorts!
After seeing how dark it was, it did cross my mind that maybe I had used too much color powder so I went to the website where it came from and the only thing I could find as far as directions on how to use it was a note that if the lather wasn't white, you used too much! I had a few pieces of the 'spillage' so this morning I lathered it up and sure enough, blue bubbles! But it smells devine! So more research is defintely in order! AND notes taken instead of depending on my rotten memory!
Oh, and upon closer look, I noticed some...graininess on the dge of some of the white parts. I don't know what made that, maybe the glycerin?
....however I had to laff a bit because I could very well imagine that being me.
