Confetti Soap

It's been a year and a half since I made the botched red patchouli soap that bleeds red. I took one of the bars and grated it up with a cheese grater, some big and some small shreds. Once soap is made, it cannot be melted and unmade. So if you mess up you can't melt it down again. Hence comes this confetti soap.

I got the idea from the Soap Queen website, when reading about colorant issues. I have to wait a month for it to cure and test it, but I only grated up one bar of red and put it into a regular white batch with 1500 g oils. I used my basic hand soap recipe where I make the larger bars and cut them in half for our family use. (perfect size for toddler hands). I like to use rendered tallow for it since it comes from the quarter beef we bought last year. It takes a lot more work to render tallow than it does to just open a package of lard, so I suppose that makes me want to save it for our home use. I think also that because tallow has such a high melting point (higher than lard, and MUCH higher than coconut oil) it makes for harder bars which last a very long time. If you ever have an unlabeled jar of lard and another of beef tallow and you aren't sure which is which (as I have on several occasions), lard is soft like butter at room temperature while tallow is still rock hard. Even straight from the fridge, I can scoop lard a little, but tallow is now a cold rock. There is a lot of science behind soapmaking that is pretty interesting. Our library purchased Scientific Soapmaking at my request last year but I have not gotten a chance to read it yet.

I have been thinking of putting eucalyptus scent into soap but was hesitant since it is such a strong smell. Normally I wouldn't put scent into our basic soap but I wanted to experiment with eucalyptus, so I put 4 grams worth into this batch, and you can't smell it at all after saponification. So now I know to use my regular 15g for a 1200 g batch and it will probably be perfect.

I made this soap 10/9/2016, and cut it a day later. I think it turned out very pretty. Here's hoping I don't see any red lather this time around, especially since this is what I'm planning for us to use for the next year (with a scented bar here and there).