Violet soap

violet soap

Hot on the heels of last Saturday's batch, I decided that I was going to do another batch of soap on Sunday.

I wanted to do a smaller batch this time, sticking to 1-pound. I also decided against the molds (some of the soap is STILL stuck a week later). Instead, I used the small plastic tray I used for my first batch. This is a rubbermaid drawer organizer, about 12-13" long, and about 4" deep. It holds one pound of soap perfectly. I lined it with freezer paper, and it produces nice square bars.

Anyway, for this soap, I came up with this recipe:
Rice bran : 35%
Soybean oil : 25%
Olive oil : 20%
Coconut oil (76 deg) : 13%
Castor oil : 7%

I'm running low on fixed oils, hence the odd proportions. It's not a particularly hard bar, but it should be really conditioning. I guess the low coconut oil percentage plays a lot into the low hardness. This one rates as 26% hardness, 9% cleansing, 69% conditioning.

Since I had about 3409809 new scents to try, I was super excited to try one of them out. I settled on violet-sassafras, which really, smelled like straight violet. I did something different this time, adding the fragrance and dye with the other oils at the beginning. I don't know if it was this method, or the chill in the room, or both, but it came to trace almost immediately! I threw in a bit of MAC purple & purple irredescent glitter (I almost NEVER use them, so this seemed like a good application) after I had the stick blender in there for a minute or so. The effect is pretty subtle, which is what I wanted.

soap in the mold

The oddity of this batch was that I had added a generous amount of blue & red dye at the beginning. Violet soap, so a purple color seemed appropriate, no? Well, as the soap was stirred around for a while, all the dye that was in there seemed to be losing a war against green. I was not sure how that was happening, since I put a fairly generous amount of blue & red in there. So I added more blue. And more red, to no avail. Maybe some ingredient in the fragrance discolors the soap, like vanilla does. The color was a mossy-olivey-greenish-brown. Not unattractive, but not the purple I was hoping for.

Then I spilled. I think about half the batch fell out of the bowl. The stick blender was too heavy, and as soon as I turned my back, the bowl fell over. Screaming "AHHHHHHHH," I grabbed a spatula and dumped the batch back into the bowl. Barehanded. Now, this is not something I'd recommend to people because cold-process soap uses lye, but it did not burn me at all. I guess this goes with the theory that most of the lye is used up in the saponification/trace process. Either that, or I'm a superhero!

I went ahead at this point and poured my soap into the mold. It seemed a little runnier than the last batch, but that one was quite obviously past trace. I put it atop the radiator in the kitchen (under the kitchen counter), covered with a hand towel. This is a warm place, out of the reach of inquisitive kittens. I left it be for a good 24-36 hours to set up before I could cut it into bars. When I unwrapped it, lo and behold, it turned PINKISH PURPLE. What a pleasant surprise. I used my corregated blade to cut them; they seemed a bit stickier than the vanilla batch I made, but I think I just didn't recall that it was soft & sticky. I got about 12 small bars out of it, which are now curing. They smell so good.

space soap

And now I will wrestle with the last few bars of the green "Fresh Sugar" soap stuck in the molds. I did manage to get more than half of them out, which is some progress. Unfortunatly, since it was so overly-thick when we poured, the batch didn't settle into the molds properly (especially where there was fine detail) and there were quite a few air bubbles as well. So, most look quite ugly, but thankfully the space ship/rocket ones are a bit better. At least they smell fantastic. I have a few of the others in the freezer (in an egg-shaped knobby mold), hoping that will help them release. The last two? I'm not sure how I'm going to get them out. The mold is not flexible at all, and they're quite firmly smooshed in there. I think I might resort to an x-acto knife and a blow torch. Next time, LINE OR SPRAY THE MOLDS FIRST, DUH.