Saturdays are made for making soap, and I managed to squeeze some time in to throw down a double batch between my younger daughter’s soccer tryouts and my older daughter’s tryouts. I was working on stocking up for my private label account, but my mind wasn’t on my work. I mixed my lye mixture, melted my saturated fats, mixed it all together, added the fragrance, did a great swirl, and began to pour it into the moulds. I noticed it was getting thick kinda quickly, and I didn’t think that fragrance blend accelerated the trace. I poured it into the moulds, and… What the heck!?!?! My moulds were only half full. I stood and stared at the moulds, wondering what had happened. Then it hit me: I had forgotten to put the unsaturated oils in.
So, I dumped all the soap back into the bucket, added the liquid oils into it, and mixed it all together. Buh bye beautiful swirls. I ended up with some lovely shade of wine that I could never duplicate in a million years. I still had a little bit of red and black soap left that I wanted to use for swirls, so I dropped that on top. My oldest said, “That looks like a crime scene. Not as bad as Daddy’s brain soap [interestingly enough, same type of soap], but still pretty bad.”
I went ahead and did the swirl… (This is after it saponified; I forgot to get a pic before I put it to bed)
When I popped these bad boys out of their moulds, I was delighted with the fascinating swirls on the bottoms. Not all the soap had gotten out of the moulds, so the effect was really cool!
Not every batch of soap happens in soapmaking utopia, and not every batch of soap turns out to be just the most awesomest, coolest, most incredible ever. This one sure didn’t, but at least it wasn’t the worst batch to come through the lab.
