I made my first batch of cold process soaps on Friday. For those who aren’t so familiar with soap jargon, cold process soaps are the old-fashioned lye soaps. The idea of working with the lye was intimidating at first, but I just used all the safety precautions and had no problems whatsoever. This first batch is completely all natural – colored a pretty pumpkin orange with paprika and scented with a ginger bergamot essential oil blend. I’ll probably scent some batches in the future with fragrance oils just to get rid of them to make room for more essential oils. (My storage space is getting a bit crowded.) Today I ordered a couple of ultramarine pigments, beautiful, rich, natural colorants. Tomorrow I’ll likely buy some spices to use for other natural colorants.
The soaps came out of the mould today – rather ungracefully. That’s the last time I use a plastic mould for CP! I was able to hand-mould them into something approximating rectangles and can trim them when they’re cured in a few weeks. I’m excited about this new adventure in soapmaking and look forward to expanding this product line as part of my business. Start looking for these on my site around late May and early June.
