What soapy thing have you done today?

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Yesterday I picked out several soaps for Hubby's brother, who flew out from California for a surprise visit. It was truly a surprise. Hubby spoke with him on his birthday (Hubby's b'day) 4 days earlier and had no inkling, then we walked into MIL's room at the nursing home and there he was! MIL still does not believe we didn't know he was coming and just kept it a secret from her to surprise only her. :)

I have been packaging and labeling soaps for a few days, a few at a time, so gathering up several to give away was easy. I have yet to gather the ones to give to family I will be visiting on my roadtrip, let alone packing for the trip. I want to make at least one or two more batches of soap before I leave because I want to enter something in the July SMF challenge AND I have some scraps I want to use up before I leave.

After cutting my second batch of confetti soap, I was unhappy with it, so I put all the bars back in the mold and turned the oven on low again. I'll be checking those today to see if it helped.
 
Masterbatched oils today for the first time. I usually make different recipes each time but been making more soaps lately and thought I could save some time with masterbatch. Spilt quite a bit of olive oil...bad day...cleaned up and called the day.
 
I finally went to Big Lots @ lunch today and grabbed some coconut oil. Scored four of them. I would have gotten the other two, but "Tall Man" (my nic for a coworker) walked away and I couldn't reach them. When he came back I was already checked out. It was raining so he carried two gallons of coconut oil and a GIANT (36 rolls) pack of toilet paper to the car while I carried the other two gallons of coconut oil. I should be good for tp and coconut oil for at least a week. Maybe two. :lol:
 
I went to a local farmers market and talked to a young man who sold vegetables, eggs, loofas and soap. Had a wonderful talk with him. Bought two bars of his soap and ran home to try them. They were high coconut that bubbled up nicely and didn't dry my skin out at all. Was talking to him about high lard soap so when I was home
I grabbed him a huge bar of soap from the mosaic challenge. Told him to hang on to it for a couple of months. First time I talked face to face with another soaper and thoroughly enjoyed it. Complimented his soap and he was very proud of it as he should have been. Also talked to a meat vendor and paid for some tallow that he will bring in 1 or 2 weeks so I can try my hand at rendering, he also will have elk and bison again. So that is a nice to have a vendor for tallow. Overall great soaping day for not making any.
 
I stayed up late last night and made another attempt at a Clyde Slide. Although I think the soaps are pretty, it doesn't really look at all like a Clyde Slide.
Wrapped & labeled more soap. I really like this shrink wrapping method.
Will do one more attempt at the challenge soap after Hubby goes to bed. The oils are all ready awaiting the lye solution. We have house guests arriving tomorrow, and I am leaving for my roadtrip on Sunday, so this will be my last chance to get it done.
 
Got some new micas in from Nurture Soap Supplies and OMG the sample scent they sent smells DELICIOUS
it's called Island Ambrosia, so I made a Roll-on perfume with it!
Another FAVORITE scent from Nurture Soap, if you like coconutty scents you'll love this one.
 
Going to try my second shot at this month's challenge based on these photos. My scent is "Tuscan Patchouli" and I hunted for photos of Tuscany and patchouli to get my color inspiration. I'm using indigo as the base color to get that murky cloudy sky look.

March_Ingredients_Patchouli_480x340.jpg


Tuscany-380x300.jpg
 
I attempted to try Irish's LGS recipe. I forgot the glycerin so in a way I failed. But since I used beer and the soap is still very nice, I'm not the least bit upset about it. I just hope it doesn't irritate my mom's skin.
 
I printed all of my recipes out with the fatty acid compositions and I'm going to compare them. Since there is not much of a difference between the recipes (just a basic recipe of lard/olive oil/coconut oil and castor with a different "specialty" oil), I don't anticipate a large difference in the fatty acid profiles; however, I just want to compare them out of curiosity. I've noticed that the profiles for olive and olive pomace are exactly the same. So, I'm going to make a batch with olive and olive pomace as the "specialty oil" and then another plain batch substituting all of the olive oil with olive pomace. I've got plenty of soaps around that have just the olive oil in them, so I don't need to make up another plain batch to compare it to. I'm noticing that the pomace oil I have is greener and more olive smelling than the Costco brand olive oil. So, I won't use any colorants or fragrances in the batches so I can see if the pomace oil scent comes through the cured soap. I also have neem, rice bran, cherry kernel, meadowfoam, emu, jojoba, argan and apricot kernel oils to test out. I also bought some stearic acid for kicks and giggles; it was only $3/lb. The neem oil does not stink as bad as I thought it would. It doesn't smell that great, but it isn't as bad as the neem EO I purchased a couple of years ago. I had to throw that stuff out; it was bad enough to gag a maggot. Off to compare my recipes.
 
I did 2 soaprelated things today.

Well, one was sortah soaprelated, it was to set up my instagram account where I show my soaps and soapy inspiration! (nature images, flowers, colors etc) and also snippets of what other stuff I might do.

If you are on instagram and are on here and wish to follow, just pm me! It is an open account but, I thought I not post it openly on this forum for possibly spammers / bots to see ; P

The other soapy things was making 3 pounds of a Bastile soap. I just wanted to make a slightly bigger batch than the normal 2 pound one, because I want to cure this baby for a loooong time.

Other Bastiles I have made in the past has been super lovely after just 6-8 weeks, so now I want to make more of it and keep it longer so it doesn`t get used up/given away so fast. Hubby loves Bastile on his hair too, and it works great for his dry scalp. He keeps his hair reeeeeally short (what he has left, lol, so it works great for him, he isn`t saving up hair to grow ponytails : P )

One thing happened though...
A green color really (really!!!!!!!) morphed on me, and became such a ugly brown color that reminded me of... Nope, I can`t even say it.

I really hope that it either... 1) morphes back to the green I really wanted it to be, or 2) that it at lest somehow will work against the other colors of cream, green, red, purple, yellow.

I used Nurtures Fairy Garden so wanted some fun but soft colors that weren`t "lego" colors. But that brown one... blech. But we`ll se. Maybe I`ll be surprized when I cut it. I dumped other colors on top to hide it as much as I could.
And to top it off, I got a BIG box of it too. yay... o_O
 
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