Auctioned Soap

I made two batches in a row for a church auction. I only auctioned 4 bars of each though.

8/20/2015

This one was cinnamon again with yellow colorant.

8/21/2015

And this one was orange scent. My favorite scent really, but I have to use 3x the amount I would of other oils (and I used a 5x concentrated orange oil in the first place). So it is more expensive. And it fades quickly, within a few months instead of a year. I used no colorant here, the orange oil turned it yellow/orange. (Not great planning on my part for the auction, two yellow soaps...). Still, everyone loved the orange scent.

Lavender and Vanilla Soaps

3/31/2015

Another lard based soap, lavender scented with blue swirls. I had friends who were having baby boys at the same time, so I made these imagining it would make a nice mother gift at the baby shower. I have to make soap at 4 weeks ahead since it takes that long to cure. Kind of annoying, but that's cold process for you.

5/4/2015

This soap was colored by mixing red and blue pigment. I had the notion it would be purple...but it came out this mauve color. It was supposed to smell like vanilla thanks to benzoin essential oil, but I discovered benzoin to be a strange character (and not at all oil like..its thicker than honey). Too mild, the scent was destroyed in saponification. I still have some of the oil that I keep meaning to use in chapstick or something. But I have yet to make chapstick. So. There it waits.

I posted a picture of this soap on facebook and one person said it looked like headcheese, or brains. Greeaaaat. thanks. best compliment ever.

Cinnamon and Patchouli Soaps

My fourth batch of soap I was finally comfortable enough to do a scented one. This one had cinnamon leaf essential oil. But no colorant. I was not brave enough to do both at once...yet. Also, I had run out of beef tallow and so branched out into the convenience of lard. One pound blocks of it.

12/11/2014

And that's the only photo from that batch. It was uniformly colored so didn't look much different in cross section. Cinnamon scent still remains a favorite of mine. Also you can see the cardboard has been replaced with wood blocks on the ends. Each soap "loaf" makes 14 bars of soap. The end pieces are always a little wrinkly looking, so I always keep those for me. I cut soap with a chefs knife, but grew tired of my imperfect slices so have since bought a cheapo miter box from home depot that helps me have uniformly sized bars. I gave the soap as gifts to people over the course of a year, and then two people have started buying it from me on occasion so I always cut 1 inch bars now. The end pieces are always slightly under 1 inch, but I get 12 1-inch-thick bars that are nice enough to sell or give away out of each batch.

3/15/2015
My next batch was both colored and scented, my first try at that. It was also the only batch of soap that I refused to give away (because it was botched)...or really use much of personally. I made a mistake with the pigment powder which resulted in soap that produced a pink lather. Like bleeding soap. I still have at least half of the batch. I tried using it for a while, but it would stain my tub and shower curtain and I got so tired of having the scum on our ancient tub be so obvious that I felt obligated to clean more often...and so I nearly threw it out. I'm glad I didn't because I have finally found a use for it, which will be in a later post.

The scent is patchouli. It didn't do anything for me and I wouldn't use it again, at least not alone.

That white stuff on top is quite visible on this soap. I didn't understand what it was for the longest time. You can rub it off easily, but it was rather irritating. Finally this year (2016) I read something about it. It is ash precipitate from the lye. I put enough oil in the soap that the lye is fully used up in the chemical reaction, but there is still the precipitate on top. The solution is to spritz with rubbing alcohol after pouring. I don't have the issue anymore, but you'll see it on a few more projects.

Next two soaps

My soap mold arrived, purchased on etsy, so I made another batch with some green oxide pigment I'd purchased with the lye.

Poured on 10/23/2014

Freshly poured, and swirled around for design.

After saponification.

The soap is 3.5 inches wide. That is standard for cold process soap molds, but I think it makes soap bars that are too big and unwieldy. When cut in half, they are quite small, so I wanted something in between. 

post soap making mess

Here is what rendered beef tallow looks like..in mason jars (which was a bad idea in hindsight. I freeze it in blocks now and wrap in plastic.)

And for my next soap 10/24/2014, I rigged up these 2.5 inch wide cardboard inserts to make a narrower bar that is comparable in size to store bought. (the cardboard was inadequate. I had some leak troubles too...and soon went to home depot and had some legit wood blocks cut for me, which I use for almost all later projects.)

These bars are better sized in my opinion. The only difference was adjusting my soap recipes from 1500 grams of oil to 1200 grams. That swirl effect was made with a clothes hangar--one of those pants ones with a waxy paper tube. I wrapped it in plastic to prevent corrosion on the aluminum. It has long since bit the dust, and I haven't got a good replacement yet. 

Soap making + first soap

I'm going to use this blog to post the cold process soap projects I've been doing over the last two years. (It's not like I'm using it for anything else these days.) I make soap and take pictures, but I've never put it all in one place. I just made my 15th batch of soap so I have some catching up to do.

Here is the first batch I ever did, 10/21/2014.  I had no mold yet and I lined an loaf pan with plastic. I didn't insulate it or anything, and the edges showed an incomplete gel phase. No picture of the cut bars for this batch.

I decided to make soap for the first time because I had some beef suet from a quarter of beef I'd gotten from a farmer. I rendered it into tallow, and then made this soap using olive oil, beef tallow, and coconut oil. And lye of course, which I'd ordered online.

I read a couple of books which were mostly unhelpful (Ann Bramson's Soap: Making it, Enjoying it is a classic but the methods are very out of date. Robert McDaniel's Essential Soap was better but didn't talk enough about cold process and all the recipes were vegan.) But I found the basic soap tutorial on humblebee & me very helpful, along with some other reading I did on the internet.

end of year

When I woke up this morning I immediately felt relieved. I can have fruit again. I don't have to eat sugar, but I can if I want to.

Since writing my last post one month ago, I have had to eliminate all dairy from my diet. Anything derived from milk, including butter and cheese, I can't eat anymore. That combined with the gluten free, fruit-free, sweetener-free, dessert-free has been tedious to say the least and quite stressful and overwhelming.

In my last post I said this year has been a failure, and that has not changed with avoiding fruit this past month. I had too many other limits on my diet to be able to appreciate what I was doing, and I have been concerned more for my health this year than any other in my life, even without the sugar. So being worried in general did not help.

I began this year being inspired by my friend Melissa, who dropped refined sugar and then subsequently dropped something like 55 pounds, most of it in the first few months. I did not expect that to happen, and it has not. I did lose 20 pounds,but that was the result of several periods where I counted calories (30 more to go!). Quitting sugar did stop me from gaining weight, however, and it was one less thing to worry about during reduced calorie periods.

Fruit-free has made a little bit of difference in terms of cravings, making them a little less. But going fruit-free after 11 months of sugar free was not the best planning, since I'd already used up most of my enthusiasm. It would have worked much better to do fruit-free/sugar-free/dessert-free from the start, and have it last a much shorter time, like 6-8 weeks. (I like this book, I Quit Sugar, that outlines a program like that).  I will probably do that program in the future, after I have figured out some of my other health issues.

I hoped to be able to say that I didn't care about sugar anymore, but I do still care. I learned that to me, unrefined sugars like honey and maple syrup are just as bad as regular sugar. And I know now I need to limit fruit intake to 2 servings a day, since more has negative effects on me.

Would I do it again? No. Would I recommend it to others? I don't know. I did learn a lot this year. I think going without added sugar for a few months would help any person struggling with their relationship to sugar.

My new mantra going forward is not to avoid any types of sweeteners, but rather to eat treats only after dinner.

the end.

1 month to go

I have about one month left of my sugar free year. So far, the experiment is a failure. I have not lost my cravings for sugar at all, even with avoiding dessert the last 5 months (including over thanksgiving and christmas--which was brutal). Some people do well with honey instead of sugar, but for me it seems to make no difference at all. I always craved sugar, even when I had not had it in months.

And so I will do one last attempt before the year is up. I will continue to cut out all sweet things (which I did for 5 months except for one week in there I had unrefined sweetened treats again), but now will no longer eat fruit. I know I get sugar cravings when I eat more fruit, so I'm interested to see what happens without it. I eat enough vegetables that I am not concerned with any loss of nutrients.

I may extend the year a few weeks so that I give fruit-free a good run.