Crafty Girl

I’ve got three kinds of soap here, but only two batches. For the first batch I made two “logs” scented with lavender but added oatmeal to the second mold. I made this one about 2 weeks ago.

And then Sunday (same weekend I finished the Bulky Cardi and Bill was out of town) at 6 AM (I’m a very early riser, usually around 4:30 AM) after surfing the net for an hour or so I got the bug again. It’s scented with Sandalwood and Jasmin and has lots of “special oils”

So the I generally use a blend of coconut oil, palm oil, olive oil, castor oil and then usually something special like shea butter or whatnot. Well, I have craploads of special fancy oils and I never use them. That is going to change. I really need to use this stuff up! So I found a recipe that was similar to my standard but had cocoa butter, avocado oil & apricot kernel oil. I have all of those!

I dragged everything up from the basement only to find I was out of my pre-melted palm oil. You see, palm oil is solid at room temp and separats into layers. In order for your soap to turn out correctly it needs to be melted and mixed thoroughly before using. I think they sell some stabilized version now, but when I buy I buy big (grin) and I’m not yet out of the 6 gallon bucket I bought about 2 years ago (second one though, so I do use lots of my main oils).

I went outside and started hooking up the turkey cooker and a big pot of water to give the oil a hot water bath to melt it. I unhook the propane from the grill (no tools necessary) and hook it to the cooker (crescent wrench necessary). Bill normally deals with the propane and propane excessories. I just make stuff. I pried off the lid of the bucket and discovered this is a completely brand new untouched bucket of oil. I get oil all over me hoisting the bucket into the water (there’s a clue here). Then I realized that I used to always put some kind of rack in the bottom so the water can circulate around and the plastic isn’t in direct contact with the hot metal bottom. Damn! Then I realized that it’s been so damn hot in the garage where I store said bucket that the oil is mostly melted even though it’s only 60ish degrees out that morning (hence the getting it all over myself). I got a long spoon and stirred it up and had no need to melt it. So I wasted about 1/2 hour and made a big mess doing all of that.

In the end I measured out oils for the soap I made that day and an entire other batch for next Sunday. The next one will use Emu oil, Almond oil and some other “special stuff”. I like to measure out more than one batch at a time cause there’s the same amount of mess to clean up if you are measuring 1 or 5 batches.

Oh! Good thing I was reading about the properties of different oils to refresh myself. This batch was really high in cocoa butter and can make a VERY hard bar so it’s something you want to slice as soon as it’s cool. I’ll post the recipe for this when I get home. I sent it to myself but then I deleted it. Silly me.

Edited to add the recipes…

This entry was posted on Friday, August 12th, 2005 at 1:26 pm and is filed under Soap. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.