Friday, September 3, 2010

Soap Drama

Seeing as how my Sincerely Vienna (lavender) has been flying off the shelves, I've been making a lot of it lately.  So when I poured my latest batch into the mold something seemed different, it didn't fill up the mold like it usually does, but of course I didn't think too much about it.  Until.....I was un-molding and cutting into bars.  It was much whiter then usually and it had an almost crumbly texture to it.  Normally when I cut the soap is still a little moist (I'm impatient) this was almost opposite to what I normally get.
 
That's not mouse poo on top, it's Lavender buds!
I could snap the little end cuts in half!  Now I had a problem....I had NO IDEA what I had done wrong.  I knew it was lye heavy, my tongue is still tingling, completely forgot about those PH strips I have....Doh!!  I didn't want to have to throw it out, but I wasn't sure how I would go about rebatching it when I didn't know what I had left out.
So, after some hair-pulling and a little whining and crying on a soap forum....I figured out what I did wrong!  I had left out over 500 grams of olive oil!  How?  A little while ago my lovely husband made me a bigger mold and I in my infinite wisdom decided not to print out a new recipe but to just write the increased amounts beside my smaller recipe.  My recipes are printed with pounds, oz, and grams, but I only wrote down the oz.  But half-way through my recipe, while measuring the olive oil, I decided to switch from oz. to grams, because it is such a large amount.  I didn't even clue in that I was using less oil, grrrrrrr!
So, now I was a little bit frustrated but also happy because at least now I knew what had happened and I could rebatch with no problem.

There you have it, my little 'Soap Drama'.  Would you like to see the end result?.......not too bad after all.


4 comments:

  1. Se ve muy bonito el jabón. Besos.

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  2. Thank you Atenea, I'm very happy they turned out after all the drama!

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  3. Love the finished product. Looks beautiful. Where do you sell your soaps? xo Jen

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  4. Thanks for your nice comment Jen! Right now I'm selling online, sincerelynatural.ca, since it seems like the least stressful way with 3 kids ;-)

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