Bob and I made a couple of batches of soap together over the Christmas break and we had so much fun together that we decided to use the Christmas money that Grandpa Bill gave us to buy some stuff that we wouldn't normally be able to get. We went online to Majestic Mountain Sage at http://www.thesage.com/ and had a lot of fun picking out a lot of different things. We picked up our order in Logan (where MMS is located) last weekend and it was so fun to bring the box home and go through it. What should we make first? Some Sandalwood shaving soap for Bob, some spearmint lip balm, a headache balm or I even want to try my hand at making my own lotion. So many choices!
In the end I wanted to try some soap made with ground up vanilla beans (for color, smell and texture) and scented with Tahitian Vanilla fragrance oil. So yesterday, while the older kids were at school I laid Grace down for a nap, put in Scooby Doo for Nathan and away we go!
First thing to do is gather everything I needed and prepare the soap molds. The last batch of soap we made did NOT want to come out of the mold! It took two days, two trips to the freezer and finally blunt force, Bob-style to get the soap out! I did not want a repeat of that so I brushed my molds with a little bit of mineral oil this time.
Then I measured out the different oils into a microwave safe bucket. An accurate scale is very important as is a good recipe! You can find some fun recipes on http://www.thesage.com/ as well as this cool feature they have called a lye calculator. You put in how much of each kind of oil you want and it tells you exactly how much lye and water you need to get the job done. You don't want too much lye (burning soap - bad!) or to little - soft, oily soap isn't much good either!
After the oils were ready I measured out the lye, the water and then proceeded to my front porch where I stood upwind to mix the two together. This is where the chemistry starts to get interesting. When you combine the lye and water not only does it temporarily produce fumes you don't want to breath but the whole thing heats up to somewhere around 160 degrees! After it has cooled down a bit I took it back inside. Now, I'm sure some of you are saying "Are you crazy? Lye is so caustic!" Well I was nervous at first too but I realized that I deal with plenty of caustic chemicals around the house anyway. If you treat a lye solution with the same respect you do your bottle of bleach you will be just fine!
After the oils are melted, the lye is ready and the two are about the same temperature it's time to get the party started!
I poured the lye solution into the oils and whipped out my favorite kitchen tool, my immersion blender! It doesn't take long to bring the oil and lye together with the blender, less than a minute with this batch. Before I added the fragrance and vanilla beans I tried pouring just a little bit of the white soap into the bottom of my molds. I wanted the roses and the dragonflies to be white.
This is what the soap looked like after adding the fragrance and ground vanilla beans. Yummy!
I poured the rest of the soap into the molds, covered them with cardboard and then wrapped them up with towels for a long winter night nap.
Wrapping the soap up like this helps the saponification (the oil and lye becoming soap) process. It's so hard not to peek during this stage...
This morning I unwrapped the soap molds and to my relief the mineral oil seemed to do the trick because the soap popped right out. My idea of putting a little bit of the plain white soap in first didn't work out quite like I wanted it too though. When I poured the rest of the soap in it forced the white part out. Oh well, it still looks interesting and I'm sure the soap will clean just as well as if the white part had stayed put! Now I just have to wait a few weeks for the soap to finish curing and then I can try it out. I can't wait! In the meantime, what should I make next???
