A sorry week for soap making

Wow. I got one good soap from a week of soap making. I hope people are in the mood to accept some less-than perfect soaps in a month or two; I have to get rid of everything eventually.

I was trying drop swirls and swirling. I am not at all good at drop swirls. In the end, I tried making a soap I saw that I loved and sometimes trying to reproduce something teaches you more than winging it without the model. Such was the case for me with this. I made 4-5 other soaps but none had the right drops and certainly none of them turned out well except for my copycat version. I am thankful to the person who made the soap I first saw. They used only paprika to get their base color, so I sued paprika-infused oil, paprika, a bit of red brick oxide and a discoloring FO. I got some water difference effects in the white and black, which I really like.

This is all I got for a whole week of soaping!

Living in the land of mediocrity 

Yes, that's where I've been, working my ass off to get the pattern I want and cutting to find that I'm am utterly utterly off base. Without knowing what I wanted, the soap looks fine for the most part, but the soapmaker's private hell is that knowledge of what was to be, but isn't. Honest to Pete, I'm ready to try voodoo to cure me.

I forgot to alternate the gold and the yellow and remembered on the last pour. Come on! Christmas soaps are okay although the second one is over-swirled and not as expected. Tried a swirl a la Petra and that turned out okay but of course is not nearly as good as hers. I did manage to get a thick sparkly gold mica swirl that went through the bar which was satisfying, I admit.

I am working on our current challenge which seems simple; drop swirl and then run a skewer through to swirl, no hangers allowed. I am a dunce at drop swirls. I will never assume that something that seems easy is at all easy. I simply cannot get anything to come out! My drops aren't going through the soap, of if they are, I'm swirling them into oblivion. If anyone knows why the drops always curve toward the center, please let me know. I don't think I can make any more trash so I may be done. I hate being so incompetent but I also hate drowning in bars of flops and I think my hatred of even more excess soap than I already have is outweighing my drive to nail a stupid drop and skewer, which we are affectionately calling a drop and swear- far more accurate. I'm showing you the best of them. The worst are, well, far worse.

I spent many hours trying to get my video together for the December Challenge I'm hosting for our forum. I did manage to get a soap I am very happy with but again, it was completely unexpected and did not go according to vision. Luckily for me, it came out better than my vision; how often does that happen?! The pink was made for the challenge (sooooo pink. The batter didn't look close to that pink.) and I love the 3D effect. I made the blue and white later and although I didn't get the depth effect, I like the bars. Made with two colors and all the variation is due to water difference. The challenge is based on Auntie Clara's blog posts about water discount in design, which is pretty amazing. I do love Auntie Clara.

Hangers abound

Our forum's challenge this month is secret feathers which started me on hanger swirls again. I had some good luck and some bad, as usual.

i like the color combo of the first one but am disappointed with the lack of fluidity in my swirls. It makes it look like I have a bad tremor.

In the second one, I had my hanger at the bottom (what looks like the top of the soap) but I pulled up the dividers first, stupidly, which knocked the hanger out of place so when I pulled it up, I completely missed all the colors. Looks kind of dumb as it is, but lesson learned.

The third soap is my favorite of the week and I've been trying to make something similar again but I haven't been able to get my trace right. In trying to make it agin, I discovered a love spell FO that actually accelerates some which was highly disappointing and so ended up with my unscented low batter batter being as thin as water and the scented part kind of gloppy. Should be interesting to see how the two consistencies play off each other. Or not. That one is currently under wraps trying to gel.

next month's challenge is drop swirls so I am trying to think of a good color combo or an interesting twist on that technique. I shall keep my eyes open, hoping for inspiration.

'Tis brief, but it's late and tomorrow is Monday, the start of another week to manage.

Lucky me!

I had a bad week of soaping. Everything had issues, from separation, to ricing in the mold to being just blech. I made a T&S mold out of legos because there is no 1 pound T&S mold that I have found, and then I had to put it to use. I don't know why but I decided to do a hanger swirl although I was not looking for a butterfly pattern. When I get to the bottom of a box of tallow, I always get a lot of crackling; there must some settling of different fats from top to bottom but I have nothing in which to melt 50 pounds of tallow to reintegrate everything, so I just expect the additional problem at the end of my box.

I think with this soap, the crackle works very well. This may be my favorite batch of soap ever because I like the flow and the old-fashioned look it has. Maybe it's not old-fashioned but just has a certain character that I like. Breaking a streak of lousy soaps may also endear me to it. I tried a similar thing in a different 1 pound mold but my colors were very thin and the background batter was much thicker. It's a very different soap from the first but I am happy with it too although the black soap wins out.

Sometimes I seriously love it

when I get an oddball soap.

A busy week or two

I was working on ITP pours again but I had problems getting my batter to the thicker trace I wanted. How often does that happen? Only when you don't want it to. The white, black and red soap I made with low water, which with the right FO moves extremely slowly but it was truly ridiculous. I prep'ed my batter and got it colored. Blended and blended and blended with my Badger mixer but it wouldn't come to medium trace. I left it and went out, weeded the garden, dug up a bunch and planted at least 60 tulips, made some chai tea, peed about 4 times and periodically checked on my batter. Still too thin. After about 2 hours of that nonsense (no exaggeration- I started at 4 pm and finally broke at 6pm), I decided to just pour the damned thing and as soon as I saw it flow, I knew it was way too thin for what I wanted. Then, as I was covering it with a blanket, I managed to knock it partway over and because it was thin, I lost about 1/5- 1/4 of the batter. Screw it. I set it back up, covered it and let it do it's thing. It's fine but I was trying for a specific effect which I didn't/couldn't get with that trace.

I wasn't certain I would get anything good out of the hanger swirl because the colors got so thick that I had to shove some of it down into the black with my fingers. When I put the hanger in, I met with much more resistance than I've ever had so I envisioned chunks of batter I had broken away floating like flotsam and jetsam in the black. I was much relieved when I cut it.

My last sad soap....It looks like it had such potential. Part of the batter was fine but the thinner batter I used seemed to have been at trace but it must have been a fake. I was soaping outside because it was beautiful out but it was 60 degrees and I use a lot of tallow, so it must have chilled too much. Granted, It was pretty ugly in the mold but you just never know what lurks underneath the surface and I was hopeful. It gelled and then the thin parts had some separation. It was oily and gross but I had to slice it to see what was there. I actually like it, even though spots of it look like vomit. And it lathers like a beast.

I had one or two botches that will never be seen by eyes other than mine. It's best that way.

From the soap pot

I managed to hit some late evening sunlight while taking pictures of s few of my discoloring FO soap. The green cast has given way to more of a tobacco brown and in the rich evening light, they look deep and stony, which I like. The light was fleeting so I didn't get many pictures but later this week I will try again. I always seem to get marks and odd spots on my soap, but I suppose that's a reflection of me, since I am incapable of not being messy.

I made another batch with a discoloring FO, not knowing if I would ever like any of my other batches, and I'm impatiently waiting for them to fully discolor. I used BB's Cedar and Saffron so the yellowed parts should go caramel brown.

I made a small batch in a chai tea carton because I can't find a vertical mold that I like yet. First, the carton is not structured sturdily enough for a batch of batter so in spite of my impromptu supports, they are oddly shaped. They also came out completely other than what I expected and I do mean completely. I got no distinction between my colors, which looked pretty obvious in batter, and I thought I'd get a visible pattern but instead it almost looks like a got a bleeding gradient type soap. Not complaining because someone will be happy to wash with them.

My espresso soap is simply not going to get dark. It seems a shame.

I've got one more batch that is currently under wraps, trying to gel. I'm very hopeful it will complete gel soon enough that it can cool enough for me to get a slice tonight. If I'm lucky, it will be post-worthy.

All the dogs are staring at me, moaning and groaning, so time for a walk. Later!