Soap making!

I have been researching cold process soap for a while now. Watching lots of videos, reading tutorials...

I found the Soap Queen and Brambleberry.com and they seem to have the best information and pricing on supplies.

For my birthday I got the back to basics kit that gives you enough supplies to make 4 different batches of soap.  One of my problems was picking a recipe to start with so this was perfect! I didn't have to choose!

 So, here is the first batch I made, all went well!  Mixing the lye water is the most nerve wracking.  It freaks me out how fast it heats up.  But I go outside when I mix it and try to leave it sit outside until it's cool enough to mix into my batch.

 This is the orange dream soap.  It smells amazing! I love orange scent.

I wasn't sure exactly how to texture the top so I kept it pretty simple.

I placed it inside my off oven and left it over night.  The next morning I could see what they call the gel phase so I pulled it out of the mold.  Neat looking right?

 I used my crinkle cutter, I really like that look.

For my second batch I made the Clean cotton.  This one uses 2 different powdered pigments and swirling.   The orange soap was just mixing it all together and pouring in the mold.  The color is just from the oils and the scent.  So this soap was very unnerving.  lol

 A lot of the information I came across mentioned curing soaps with bright colors in the oven to help the colors pop.  So I attempted this.  As you can see on the sides where it touched the mold, it left pock marks.  Turns out my soap got too hot while curing.  But!, the cool part of soaping is I can just plain off those edges after the soap is hard enough and no one will know!

 I love how this turned out, it's SO pretty!!

And for an extra bonus?  I placed the orange dream on a shelf in my pantry so it can be undisturbed while it cures the 4-6 weeks as required and every time we open the pantry we get greeted with the gorgeous smell.  

Since the smell was so nice I didn't want to mix it with the clean cotton so I placed the bars on one of my wire baking racks and set it on my dryer in the laundry room.  For almost 2 days the whole house smelled so nice with the clean cotton scent.  Now the laundry room smells really nice.  Good thing since the litter box is in there! lol

I'll do another post when I get the other 2 batches made.

Thanks for stopping by, I'd love to hear what you think, your comments mean a lot to me.