Thursday, December 5, 2013

Coloum Swirl



So it is challenge time again with Great cakes Soap Works and this month I registered on the first day and made my soap on the next day, sorta. I was hijacked by my assistant son. Every month He watches the video with me and then we go to my FO stash and my mica and pigments and talk about what colors we smell with each fragrance and decide together what I will do.
   This month it was the same process only not nearly as long. When he saw all the colors that Amy used and how it looked. He said that we were out of Patchouli and that is a tie-dye smell. I got busy weighing my oils, water and lye. Pause, I wanted this batch to be goat milk. we don't need water, go to the freezer and get a bag of milk and let it thaw enough to get into the container for lye mixture. While that happens lets run my oils through the soap calc. I am wanting to try a new to me oil. Rice Bran Oil. Run the numbers on how much soap we want to make for the mold we will use. Snag number 1. I need 80 oz. of oil for this mold because of the way I want to cut it. My milk has all been per-measured and frozen for a 64 oz batch.
    Solution, use amount of water needed to make my liquid weight, dissolve lye into water, while it is still hot add the frozen goat milk. Cross fingers that it doesn't scorch too much. meanwhile while I wait for lye to get to the right temp I get my pigments mixed in oil. Isaac chose purple, gold, bubble gum pink, and blue. Because goat milk tends to darken we added titanium dioxide to the main color after mixing all the other colors.
  Well I guess I am not a fast learner, because the purple morphed to pink and the blue went grey. After curing for a week I can also add that we did not add nearly enough titanium dioxide to the base. So for the next batch colors will be done a little more heavy handed. What else did I learn? Tri-angles are not very good for a column pour and that my son just might be making his own soap sooner that I had thought. He did this pour with very little help, He was very much in command of this batch. I wonder if he will let me help on the next one.





So For the next batch I used the same formula only not goat milk, My FO  was a little spicy so I was worried about trace happening too fast. I decided to only add FO to the main color and see it that would be OK.
second attempt. so far so good.
not so pretty here it looks like ash but it's not,
wow, I really like how it looks when you cut through the center. I still need to do this at least one more time before I am happy. This batch the colors started to thicken a little quicker than I wanted. and oddly the part that started to trace was unscented. This is Aura Lights. Isaac choose all the colors for this one too. I think he did well with his color choice I might have gone more blue but he made me look at images to prove to me that I could put in the orange.
  Thank you Amy for another great challenge. There are some amazing soapers out there.