Going cold...

When I first started making soap I used the cold process method. After mixing the oils and lye solution you pour the soap into a mold of some sort and wait for four or more weeks before you can use the soap. Saponification doesn't usually take quite that long but you want to be sure there is no live lye in your soap and you want to give the bars a chance to harden.

With hot process soap you basically cook the soap batter either by heating it in a crockpot until it volcanoes and goes through applesauce, mashed potato and Vaseline stages, or by soaping at high temperatures (in the 200F area) in a stainless steel pot/plastic container, all of the stages happen pretty quick when soaping that hot. It's pretty fun to watch this all take place within a half hour.

There are a few advantages to the hot process method. First, it's fast, once the cook is over, saponification has taken place and you can use the soap immediately. Usually you give it a few weeks to evaporate some of the moisture and give the bar a chance to harden. Another advantage is you're able to add the superfats to the soap after saponification so you can add the really good fats then, giving you the chance to control which awesome oils aren't eaten up by the lye. It's good practice to use the more pricey oils at this point. It can also help to add essential oils after the cook so they're not superheating and loosing their oomph.

There are a couple of disadvantages to the hot process method as well...at least for me. One is, the soap batter is pretty thick and while it's possible for some soapers to get some amazing swirls, it's not as easy to get the pretty bars that you get with the cold process method...at least for me. Another disadvantage is that there can be quite a bit of stirring of the hot batter which is like stirring a mix between brownie batter and cookie dough.

Due to the job I have, my hands and wrists already take a beating and stirring a thick batter gets extremely painful. Over the summer I've been working on cold process soaps because it's not as hot as working over very hot soap batters. Making the cold process soaps made me realize how much easier it was on my hands and wrists and I'm thinking I may have to go back to that method.

One concern I have is not having the ability to choose which oils/fats will superfat my soaps. I'm not even sure it will be noticeable. I'm going to give it a try and see if there is any difference in the properties of the soaps. Quality, moisturizing soaps is my number one goal. I'll do what works best to achieve that!

Christmas Soaps

A few months ago I started thinking about various soaps to make for my shop that represent the upcoming Holidays. There are still some bars of the Autumn Pumpkin Soap available for now but I wanted some soap for Christmas as well. Making organic/natural soaps can make that a little bit tricky.

It's been difficult to find a natural colorant that makes soap a Christmas red so I passed on that pretty quick. And many of the scents we associate with Christmas (cinnamon,  nutmeg, clove) can only be used in very minute amounts because they are "hot" oils that can be irritating to skin.

I asked for input on Facebook and received some great suggestions!

I ended up with three different soaps, Gingerbread Soap, Eggnog Soap and Christmas Tree Soap. I used the bare minimum of essential oils but like any new skin care item I really...highly...recommend you use these only on your hands and wrists at first to make sure you have no issues with the essential oils. And as always, check the ingredients lists to make sure you have no allergies to anything in the soap.

Gingerbread Soap

The Gingerbread Soap has some pretty awesome moisturizing oil: avocado, castor, coconut, shea butter, etc. It also has a bit of annatto seed oil and cacao powder for color, maca powder and apricot seeds for a bit of exfoliant, ginger essential oil and a bit of ground nutmeg sprinkled on top (didn't think ginger would show up very well). I love the little orange speckles and it smells so good! The bars are a bit shorter but they are also wider. You can see that it went through a partial gel, there's a darker oval that reaches almost to the edges of the soap.

Eggnog Soap

I love Eggnog, so rich and creamy and...noggy. Pretty amazing oils in this soap, too! I added a tiny bit of turmeric to the bottom to give it a creamy color and left the top plain for a bit of whipped cream. It also has nutmeg sprinkled on top, bentonite clay and nutmeg essential oil. It smells amazing!

Christmas Tree Soap

I love the way this soap smells! It has fir needle and cedarwood essential oils and it smells very Christmas tree-like! Spirulina powder was used to add color for this "tiger stripe" swirl. Still getting the hang of those swirls. 

All of my Christmas soaps will be listed in my shop on December 1st and there is a very limited quantity available!

Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte soap...

I started making this soap because so many people love coffee and coffee has great benefits for the skin. The first batch I made had coffee as part of the water in the lye solution and coffee grounds as an exfoliant.

Current Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte soap...

It is a pretty great soap with castor, coconut, grapeseed, olive, sweet almond and avocado oils, as well as cocoa butter. It also has yogurt and heavy whipping cream. I really wanted this soap to smell like coffee and I have searched for a roasted coffee essential oil for months.

During that search I started reading about the benefits of coffee bean oil (not essential oil) and there are a lot of them. I'm one of those people who kind of take miracle cures/fixes with a grain of salt even though I've had tremendous luck with essential oils for so many different things.

Some of the claims that coffee bean oil proponents promote include...

• Reduces acne
• Diminishes cellulite
• Soothes insect bites/stings
• Soothes puffy eyes
• Acts as an antioxidant and fights free radicals 
• Reduces fine lines/wrinkles

I definitely felt like it was worth the investment to add this to Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte Soap. To make recipes for soap I use a soap calculator (SoapCalc) that lets you...well, calculate soap ingredients. Most importantly, it calculates the safe amount of lye to use in your batch.

When I want to see the properties of a specific oil, I just add that one oil to get an idea of what it does for soap on it's own. So here are the results of coffee bean oil...

I mainly pay attention to the top 5 "Soap Bar Quality" numbers and I can see that coffee bean oil adds hardness to the bar, is conditioning and provides a creamy, rather than bubbly, lather. So it seems like a good addition to soap because SoapCalc is going by the oils properties (fatty acid chains and stuff), not by what the internet says about coffee bean oil. You can see that it has no cleansing properties in and of itself, however if you're using it to wash your hands your hands will still get clean...because you're washing them. In comparison, check out what happens if a bit of coconut oil is added...

It becomes a much harder bar, it has great cleansing qualities and now it has some bubbles. But, the conditioning and creamy qualities go down. Ahhhhhhh! I can spend hours working on recipes to get the best possible properties I can. So why does this happen? No idea. Obviously coconut oil has different fatty acid chains and they may react to water molecules in a whole 'nuther way.

Anyway, what was I talking about? Coffee soap! So I made more Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte Soap yesterday and added roasted coffee bean oil and coffee essential (I wasn't sure if the coffee bean oil scent would stay through the curing process). I just have to say that both of these smelled amazing! I was pretty excited about making a coffee soap that smells like coffee.

So the batch was mixed and I split a tiny bit of the batter off. To the larger portion I added organic cacao powder...it is a mocha latte, afterall. I left the smaller portion as it was and poured...

Textured the top with a spoon and sprinkled ground organic coffee and organic cane sugar on top.

Now I just clean the kitchen and start waiting to see if it gels...

The soap did gel, the hottest temperature reading was 114 degrees F.

And this morning it was ready to slice...

You can see the lighter drop swirl at the top of the bars.

This soap should darken a bit, at least the part with the cacao powder, it's a bit hard to see but there is a darker rim around the sides and bottom of the soap. This "discoloration" is part of the curing process. I was a little perplexed by the fact that the coffee grounds look like they're encased in air bubbles, I try pretty hard to eliminate air bubbles in the soap before and after the pour.

The biggest issue I have at the moment is that...I smell very little coffee. I didn't necessarily want it to be a hit-you-in-the-face coffee scent but I didn't want it to be a I-think-I-smell-coffee-but-it-might-be-my-imagination scent either. I'm hoping when the "new soap smell" wears off, the coffee scent will shine through. If not, at least it will have real coffee, coffee grounds and coffee bean oil. That's about as coffee as I can make it and it will be listed in my shop at the end of October.

If you can't wait until then to grab a bar of Gma's Jittery Mocha Latte Soap, there are a few bars of the original version left in the shop.

Sweet Erica's Honey, Oats and Goat Soap

I absolutely love this soap. Milk soaps have pretty amazing qualities and have been used for centuries as a luxurious soap. Goats milk soap has a distinctive scent, its a lovely rustic scent that reminds you there's milk in the soap. It's quite lovely and I don't know if it's my imagination but I smell the oatmeal as well!

Milk soaps contain lactic acid which is a gentle exfoliant, it helps remove dead skin cells (who knew!) and goat's milk (and other milks) contains vitamin A which is helpful in moisturizing and maintaining healthy skin.

I love the orange bars of the Sweet Erica's Honey, Oats and Goat Soap but I wanted them to be more representative of the oatmeal color of the very first oatmeal soap I made. Its such a lovely, creamy color and the oatmeal has been blended to a powder so it's not too scratchy. I love seeing the speckles of oatmeal in the bars.

So I went old school with this batch and used the cold process method (it seems to be a bit nicer to do in the summer). I was very fortunate to have my son, Tyler, here to help I definitely needed the extra pair of hands! 

Mixing lye into milk sometimes takes an extra step, it's not always necessary, it's more of an aesthetics thing. To keep the milk from turning a dark orange when adding the lye you can freeze the milk first. Freezing keeps it from overheating (and possibly scorching) when you start adding the lye. Then you add the lye to the milk ice cubes a tablespoon or so at a time and stir...a lot. The frozen milk starts to melt pretty quick and you just keep slowly adding the lye and stirring...a lot...until all the lye has been added and the milk cubes melted. Then you stir...a lot. 

It's interesting to note that the lye and the fats in the goat's milk are already starting to saponify in tiny amounts during this process and tiny beads of soap start forming. The goal with all of the stirring is to make sure all of the lye has been dissolved. I always pour my lye solution through a strainer and the little tiny beads of forming soap made that a bit more difficult than usual but it eventually happened.

Fresh in the mold...love that color!

The soap smells as good as it looks! 

Oatmeal speckles!

When I mixed the lye/milk solution into the oils the lye solution was at 78 and the oils at 85. Nice cool temps for making milk soap. The soap did gel slightly and heat up to 118, surprisingly cool. But when I cut into them...

I had a slight moment of panic. I thought the soap had the...dun dun duuuunnnnn...dreaded orange spots (DOS, and yes...as silly as it sounds, it's a thing). I've heard of it but I've never had a soap with DOS...that I can remember. I did some searching, the pictures of DOS look nothing like this and the reasons behind DOS don't apply to my soaps. So if it's not dreaded orange spots, what is it?

Okay, so here's the story. When I warmed up the oils, honey and shea butter enough to melt the shea the temps were higher than my lye/goats milk solution. I was hoping to get the soap in the mold so I stuck the pot of warm oils in an ice water bath in the sink to bring the temperatures down. If you remember the name of this soap "Sweet Erica's Honey, Oats and Goat Soap...yup, that's honey. When I placed the pot of oils and honey in the ice water bath the honey solidified from the cold. I noticed it towards the end of the pour but forgot about it until I saw the spots. I think in my head (it's crazy in there sometimes) I thought the soap would superheat (milk soaps often do) and the honey would melt/blend with the soap batter as it heated.

So now you'll get the lovely properties of honey directly on your skin and since it's in soap it washes right off. Win-win, right? Well, we'll see. The soap will be perfectly safe to use and unless something crazy happens before it's finished curing, should just be soap with a few bits of honey here and there. It should be listed in my shop in mid-October.

Moral of the story? Wait until the oils and lye solution are emulsified before adding the honey.

Autumn Pumpkin Soap

I've been debating on making some sort of soap for the upcoming autumn season for several months. I had to stop debating and make a decision this week because I knew I'd be making a cold process soap if I was making an autumn soap and adding food stuffs (like pureed pumpkin) and it will take at least four weeks for cold process to cure before I can list it in my shop.

Once that was decided I started looking into the benefits of adding pumpkin puree to soap. Pumpkin has a lot of healthful benefits like vitamin C which is great for the skin. Vitamin C helps protect skin from free radicals that cause wrinkles and other skin issues. Pumpkin also has carotenoids that are antioxidants which can help improve skin texture. It contains potassium, copper, zinc, manganese and other minerals.

Now, mind you, these are only a few of the great benefits of pumpkin, and that's when it's eaten. How much of this transfers to topical use, and after going through saponification when making soap? Honestly? No idea. However, pumpkin is used for facial masks and creams for a healthy, bright complexion so maybe it will be a beneficial addition to soap.

To me, the coolest thing about using the pumpkin is...well, it's pumpkin. It's a natural ingredient and the tiny bits of pumpkin will gently exfoliate. It's also a sign of autumn, my favorite time of year!

When I started blending everything together the oils were at 88 degrees F and the lye solution was at 93. I wanted them cooler but I was getting impatient. Between the sugars in the pumpkin and heavy cream and lye reacting to each other and the palm oil (RSPO (Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil) Mass Balance) the batter came to a thick trace pretty quickly. It was quite pudding-like when I poured it into the mold.

Fresh in the mold Autumn Pumpkin Soap. Smells so good!

It was my goal to add autumnal scented essential oils, like cinnamon. Cinnamon is such a strong scent but once I started researching I decided I didn't want to add it to this soap. Cinnamon can be a major irritant for people that can cause skin issues and possibly breathing issues.

The clove oil, which can be a slight irritant, has been added in an amount that is below the suggested safe amount by IFRA (International Fragrance Association). I've also added ginger, vanilla and orange essential oils. Warm and spicy, it smells pretty autumn-ee! In hopes of there being a bit of orange color to the soap I also added a few ounces of annatto seed oil. (Keep in mind that essential oil scents are pretty fragile so you shouldn't have to worry about smelling pumpkin pie-ish after using it.)

Superheated up to 145 degrees F pretty fast, a few minor cracks on the surface.

Once I poured the soap batter into the mold it went into gel stage and heated up very quickly. It doesn't matter how many times I make soap, I still find the whole process so fascinating!

Freshly cut and going on to the curing rack for at least 4 weeks.

I'm really hoping that as the soap cures it turns the color that you see on top and the side edges of the bars. Time will tell...

Before I list any new soaps in the shop I test them myself and give some out to family members, I feel like they're pretty honest with their feedback! The soaps will be listed in the shop in mid-October if the cure is done curing. 

Almost Old Fashioned Lard Soap

I am a bit of a wanna be homesteader. I dream of living in the middle of nowhere living a self-sustainable life. Making everything from scratch, living off of the food I grow and raising chickens for eggs, a cow for milk, butter, yogurt and cheese, dogs for protection and sheep with gorgeous wool to spin and knit into socks, sweaters, scarves and gloves.

I would want my homestead in a place where I could forage for foods that grow locally to add to my supplies and where it snowed in the winter and stayed nice in the summers...not that I don't appreciate the 113 degree days that we have in Arizona...

Anyway, one of the things that led me to making soap in the first place is that homesteading-make-it-from-scratch dream and I have wanted to do that as old school as I could. People back in the day rendered their own fats to make soap. Some even made their own lye with wood ash. I didn't go that old school, the process is very interesting but it may not be as consistent as the store bought lye.

I also didn't render my own fats, though that is something I may try in the future. I like the idea of not wasting anything, so saving fat from foods to turn into soap seems like a good thing. It's not something I would list in the shop but I wouldn't have a problem using it or giving it to family members.

The "Almost Old Fashioned Lard Soap" I put together is from Armour Premium Natural Lard I purchased off of Amazon, I couldn't find any locally that didn't have BHA (butylated hydroxyanisole) and BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene) added for preservatives. At least it wasn't anywhere on the label, not sure what the regulations are on those ingredients. I do hope to find a more reasonably priced natural lard for future batches.

When opening the lard I wasn't sure what to expect, I've only used it once before, for baking pie crusts. And of course, being human one of the first things we do with such things is we smell it. It's really hard to describe the scent of "raw" lard but it was closest to that time when you decide to deep fry foods and the oil smells like oil. Mhmm. That's the scent of a container of lard.

Not a bad smell but was it something that would carry over in the finished soap? Lard makes very hard, white bars of soap, and it's moisturizing. From what I've read, it is also a very fast moving soap so it comes to trace fairly quickly. I superfatted the recipe at a higher percentage because hard bars can handle extra fats that aren't being saponified by the lye. The extra fats makes the bars more moisturizing.

Soaping at around 80 degrees F, I get my ingredients together and start blending with my stick blender (that's why this is Almost Old Fashioned Lard Soap, they didn't use stick blenders back in the day). The only ingredients in this soap is lard, water and lye...and I'm expecting a white bar of soap...

I lined the mold with cotton fabric, I found that hint when researching Depression Era soaps.

The batter did come to trace very quickly but the soap was a very lovely orange when poured into the mold. Not quite as white as I was expecting. But over time it mellowed out a bit.

The soap did go into a gel stage, it didn't heat up past 110 degrees F, though.

And the finished bar. It isn't pure white, I'm okay with that, it's soap. After letting it cure for four weeks I gave it a try. First let me start by saying that it does NOT have the deep fried oil smell any longer. It just smells like an unscented bar of soap. It's quite nice, really. And it did make a hard bar of soap. When using, it's very silky feeling and it has a creamy, but not bubbly, lather. It just feels pretty amazing!

I only have three one bars in my shop. I hope my ancestors who made their own soap would have approved.

Cory's Arizona Sunshine Soap

At the end of March my cousin, Cory, visited from Oregon. While I'm sure she visits AZ to catch up with family and friends, I think a big part of her visits here is the Arizona sunshine. She loves the sun and the warmth that Arizona has to offer, especially in March. It is a really beautiful time of year here.

Cory and I at Mangos Mexican Café in downtown Mesa, AZ.

While Cory was here she would come pick me up so we could hang out and every single time she had a Dutch Brother's mocha latte for me and an iced tea for herself. I felt very spoiled! We shopped at antique stores, ate out and spent several hours learning how to play the "Ticket to Ride" board game (thanks for your patience, Will!).

It was great visiting with her and I was especially excited because she wanted a soap specially made for her and she agreed to help me with it. I love showing people how to make soap, especially when they show an interest in the process.

We used the cold process method to make Cory's soap because I wanted two shades of orange. I wanted her to do the hanger swirl and also swirl the top. Unfortunately, both shades of orange are so similar you can't see a difference. Soaping seems to be a perpetual learning experience but I will know better for the next batch.

Cory's Arizona Sunshine Soap

The soap will be listed in my shop at the end of April. I've been using a sample and it's safe enough to list now but I want to give it one more week just to be safe.

The soap has a lovely, creamy lather from the oils and butters (castor, coconut, grapeseed, avocado, olive, sweet almond oils, cocoa and mango butters) and it has a lovely citrusy scent from the orange and tangerine essential oils.

I can't wait for Cory to try it, I hope she loves it!

Handmade Soaps

Have you ever taken the time to learn how to do something that interests you, spent hours (days, weeks, months) studying it, preparing for it and then finally getting to make it just to have people point out that you could buy that something at the store? Mmmhmmm, yeah.

Stores carry all kinds of bath products, some are even natural, but I haven’t found any that are as lovely as handmade soap.

Learning about the natural oils and butters that go into handmade soap has been a trip! Some oils create more lather, some create more bubbles, some make a harder bar of soap, some make a softer bar of soap. Some are moisturizing, some drying if you use too much. Some oils are better as cleansers. I find it all very interesting and trying to put the right oils together in the proper amounts to get a bubbly, lathery, cleansing, moisturizing bar of soap is fun for me.

Then there are essential oils. Some are great in handmade soaps, some just disappear quickly. There are a multitude of reasons to use essential oils from their antibacterial properties to their scent. I don’t feel as if every bar of soap needs a scent, they can interfere with perfumes and colognes, and they can also be an issue for people with sensitive skin.

Amanda Bavender Lavender Soap, grapeseed oil infused with alkanet root used as the colorant.

Natural colorants like the alkanet root used in the Amanda Bavender Lavender Soap can be a challenge. Some behave just like you hope, they add the color you want to the soap you’re making and they look lovely. Other’s lose their color or completely change into a color you’re not expecting. As much as I want my soap to be beautiful, a bar’s moisturizing properties are my ultimate goal. Pretty soaps aren’t useful if they aren’t good for your skin. And there are tons of pretty soaps out there that are moisturizing as well. For the soaps I make, and use, I want to stick to natural colorants.

There are also other ingredients to consider such as activated charcoal, clays and exfoliants. I try to fit the ingredients to the purpose of the soap.

All of these things together are what makes soap making so interesting to me. They are the reasons I like making soap. I also like making soap for health reasons. Our skin is our largest organ and I think it’s just as important to be watchful of what we put on our bodies as what we put in our bodies. I try to use as many non-GMO and/or organic ingredients as possible.

Hopefully, as I learn more about the many aspects of soap making, I can share them here. Other times I may just write about random things, like the weather. Either way, welcome to my blog.