January 19, 2000

Sorry I haven't written in a while. Since I'm taking classes at night now, after work, to work on my degree, I've found my free time to update the web site has been sorely impaired. :)

I have made some nice soaps lately. A couple weeks ago I tried using fresh goatsmilk for the first time, and fell in love! It's great. I froze the milk until it was slushy and mixed it in with lye-water (half my liquid as water, half as milk), and ended up with lovely white bars from CP. Well, except for the peach bars -- which started white, and the FO discolored it! To a taupe kind of color. That was disappointing, that I spent my time worrying about whether the milk was too warm and was going to discolor, and then the darn FO turned it brown. (That was Lebermuth's "Georgia Spring Peach," by the way, which other than the discoloration is a lovely peachy FO. It's not as "ripe" peach as some other FOs, but it's a nice one.) The other milk soaps I made were a CP gms with Icicles from SweetCakes, which is a kickass FO that you should try if you haven't, it's just a great scent; a HP unscented GMS, which is all right but doesn't seem as luxurious as the CP Peach bar (which I've had in the shower all week and I think it's the best soap I've ever made, it's soooo silky smooth); and an HP Lettuce (Bramble Berry) GMS. The HP GMS did discolor, obviously, but it was a medium brown -- not bad. It was a terribly dark orangey brown when it was in the gel stage at the end of the cook though! I thought oh no, I've ruined my goatsmilk soap! But as it cooled, it lightened up in color and ended up as a tan/medium brown/dark beige type color. Not too shabby. Anyways, those bars were experiments in low percentages of or no coconut or palm kernel. I've got this awful itchy-dry skin in the winter time, and I kind of wonder if the coconut or palm kernel that I use -- I used to use high percentages of PK, or even PK and coconut in the same batch -- has been exacerbating the dryness problem. So far, the peach GMS is great in the shower. No after-shower itch at all, it's been great. How could you ever go back to evil corporate soap after making a batch that feels so niiiiiice?

I made some soap last weekend that was also somewhat experimental. Two batches, both with half water and half goatsmilk, freezer method. I tried Lecithin (lecithin, lecithin, lecithin -- I keep mistyping it as lethicin, I don't know why I can't get it right) for the first time. In case you've never seen it, it's this extremely viscous, mahogany brown liquid. Think brown/red molasses. You can add it to CP soap to help save a seized batch. So I tried that for the first time -- I had two FOs I was going to use for the first time, and I was suspicious so I got the Lecithin out "just in case." Of course my first batch seized right up, curds and whey -- ick. I dumped in about a tablespoon of the lecithin and stirred it up and it stopped the seize! Amazing. I was even able to use my stick blender to whir the blobs of soap back into liquid. It was great. Now that particular batch was 45 oz. olive and 3 oz. castor, with no salt to make it hard and no sugar to make it lather -- I wanted to make a gentle soap and see if that is good for my icky winter skin too. I know it'll be way soft when it comes out of the mold, but that's all right. I've got all the time in the world now that I only have time to soap on weekends -- In fact I left it in the mold because I won't have a chance to unmold it until Friday. :) So that worked out nicely, the lecithin. The second batch I made that day was a real oddball. It was 16 oz palm/16 oz olive with 8 oz grapeseed -- one of my faves -- and 8 oz cocoa butter, scented with Creamy Vanilla from Lebermuth. Here's the thing: I mixed my frozen goatsmilk and lye water and then wandered off and forgot about it. Totally forgot it for like three hours, I was seriously flaky this past weekend. I eventually remembered it and came back downstairs to the soap room and peeked at it -- It had turned into this really thick vanilla custard consistency. I mean if I had been some ordinary person, I would have thought it *was* vanilla pudding -- it looked EXACTLY the same. So I put it in a Pyrex measuring cup on the hotplate to warm it up a bit, to see if that would thin it down. Nope. So eventually I just decided to mix it in with the warm oils. That actually worked all right; the vanilla pudding lye sank to the bottom of the bowl and didn't want to stir in with my spoon. So I took the stick blender to it and it mixed right in nicely, I couldn't tell the difference from using liquid lye-water-milk stuff. So then, I decided to try putting the lecithin in first to prevent a seize from happening, on the off chance this other new FO was going to seize. So I dumped the lecithin in the beaker with my FO. That was a *dumb* move. Lecithin is water soluble; fragrance oil is *oil* soluble. Duh, Sabrina. So I had this gross mess of slightly brownish fragrance oil with orange-brown lecithin blobs floating around it it. I actually stuck the stick blender in the beaker to try to whir it together so it wouldn't be too big of a mess to add to the traced soap. Anyways, I dumped it in and stirred and stirred and got it all integrated and poured it into the mold. The next day, it had solidified into this orange loaf of soap with yellow speckles. I kid you not. It was like ... psychedelic vanilla. I can only hope that the brown discoloration from the vanilla will eventually cover up the splotches. :) Actually I haven't gone down into the soap room to see if it's improved in the past four days. That was one extremely weird-looking soap!

In other news, we finally have our digital camcorder. I can record and edit movies on the iMac, as well as taking digital still photos. Of course I immediately took the camcorder down into the soap room with the intention of recording when I made GMS soap this past weekend. Then I realized the soap room was a HUGE mess and there was no way I was going to record anything and post it on the internet with that mess on it, so I decided to clean up. By the time I was done cleaning it was midnight and I threw in the towel. I think I have homework this weekend but if I don't have much I'll give it another try. On the bright side, I haven't had *time* to mess up the soap room again since I cleaned house. :-)