March 31, 2000

Phew. I haven't written a diary entry in a dog's age, seems like. I am really sorry about that, by the way. It's just that, quite honestly, I got into a few too many obligations this semester. (It's interesting how you just have to take one class and poof! you're back to thinking in terms of semesters. I suppose it helps that I work at a school, though.) Work has been just crazy-busy, we had an enormous project that suffered from scope-creep like nobody's business (scope- creep is a consultant's term that means "The client keeps asking for more and more and more over what he originally wanted and won't it ever just *STOP*????") and plus we're in what is hopefully the tail stages of an administrative evaluation which is now approaching three years in the doing. Had an audit just yesterday, people from the state came in to look at our network and tell us what we're doing right and wrong. Oh man, am I ever glad that's over. The actual audit itself wasn't too painful, it was mainly just the waiting and not knowing what they were going to come do. And I took two classes this semester, a half load, so I feel like I'm working two jobs, in a nutshell. I should probably be working on a paper right now instead of this diary, actually. Oh well -- I guess I'm living dangerously. :-)

Amazingly, I have had time to make soap. Or rather, I have *made* time to make soap. Since soap is still my decompressing method, it's immensely relaxing for me to come home and contemplate my palate of soapmaking materials and put something together. Last weekend I finally got up the gumption to make transparent soap from scratch. I bought the book last year and had been meaning to make the soap ever since, but either I didn't have Everclear or needed to buy more castor oil or something or other kept me from doing it. Actually I was pretty chicken, too. It sounds really complex and difficult, and you have to work with alcohol. Anyways, last weekend I finally did it. And it worked out really well! I actually posted some photos of the soap to the site, at the Photo Gallery. The photos didn't turn out all that great, so I only posted one of the transparent soaps sitting on the windowsill in my kitchen with the afternoon sun showing through them. Someone had asked me, on the SoapersCorner list, whether or not you could melt down this transparent soap and mold it like M&P, so I took an ugly bar and melted it down to see. It did melt really nicely, but it lost its transparency almost entirely. Kind of a bummer. :( Actually, it made an interesting cafe au lait color. But I was kind of hoping that it would be remeltable over and over so I could just make it when I wanted to and not have to buy M&P base anymore. Although I have to say I bought some base from Snowdrift Farm recently, specifically because theirs contains nothing other than soap and solvent (no SLeS or other foamers or detergents -- I wanted a pure soap M&P), and I was really pleased with it. That was another thing I did last weekend, was make some cute M&P. I had these star shaped metal tube molds from American Science and Surplus, and I used round PVC pipe -- what I did was mold blue M&P in the PVC, cut that resulting round log of soap into two half-moon logs, insert the half moons into the star molds, and did an overpour of clear with Australian Opal mica and shredded glitter into the star. So I'm going to call that one "Blue Moon, Starry Night." After slicing it into bars, I sprinkled glitter over the surface, so the bars are really pretty cute. They're for a swap, so that's why I went to all the effort. :) Anyways, here's the report I sent to SoapersCorner about making Failor's transparent soap:

Date: Mon, 27 Mar 2000 09:16:58 -0600 (CST)
From: Sabrina Downard 
Reply-To: SoapersCorner@onelist.com
To: SoapersCorner 
Cc: SoapPot 
Subject: ~SoapersCorner~ Failor's transparent soap - Report

From: Sabrina Downard 

Doin' the happy soap dance today.... I took a deep breath and made 
transparent soap, with Failor's Copra soap recipe from the book,
Alex's instructions on how to skip the plastic tent silliness, and my 
own basic CSDBHP soap-making thinking... and I now have a whole bunch
of beautiful transparent soap sitting on my kitchen counter top!

Woohoo!!!!

(For a while there in the middle I was getting pretty nervous... but
it all worked out!  Yay!)

OK, so here's what I did.  I can't remember the recipe, but I used the
Copra soap (palm, coconut, castor, and stearic) recipe, unmodified.

Put my huge stock pot with several inches of water on the stove to heat.
Mixed water and lye, added silk (my one modification)
Warmed palm, coconut, castor together in my small stock pot.
Melted stearic separately.
Mixed lye-water and palm-coconut-castor together, stick-blended to trace.
Added melted stearic.  Woah, did that stuff turn into cream-of-wheat or what.
Put small stock pot in huge stock pot (double boiler), with both lids
	tightly fitted on.  Cooked for 1.5 hours over medium heat (water
	at a full boil).  
When soap was thoroughly gelled and no more tingle, added the sugar
	solution and glycerin.  Stirred it up, but the sugar and glycerin
	didn't want to incorporate.  Put the lids back on and let it all
	warm up for a while thinking that would help it incorporate better.
After 10 minutes or so, figured the sugar/glycerin would incorporate in
	its own sweet time, so I took the small stock pot out of the 
	double boiler and put it on a burner (no flame), added the alcohol 
	(Everclear -- phew, is that stuff stinky).  Stirred quickly, 
	plopped the lid back on.  
Turned the flame on its lowest setting for ten minutes.
After 10 minutes on the heat, turned off the flame for 30 minutes and let
	the soap "rest."  I have glass lids on my stock pots, so I could
	watch it as it went.  It was pretty neat, the alcohol would condense
	on the lid and drip down, only it didn't drip like water, it kind
	of...bloomed.  It was neat.  At this point, the soap mix was blobs
	of translucent goo in a freeflowing amber liquid.
After 30 minutes off the heat, took my whisk and tried to stir the soap goo
	into the liquid.  Ended up with a whiskful of goo and not much
	progress.  Banged the whisk on the side of the pot for a good two
	minutes or so just trying to get the stuff out of the wire.  :)
Put the flame back on for 10 minutes, let sit for 30 minutes, stirred again.
After the third iteration of flame/rest, the soap was nearly completely
	dissolved into the amber liquid.  And it was pretty liquidy -- I
	was pretty doubtful that that stuff was going to turn into soap,
	it was the consistency of maple syrup (just a *little* thicker than
	water).  I stirred it up a bunch to get the remaining soap blob-lets
	dissolved.  At this point, every time I took the lid off, a film
	quickly formed over the top -- like the little skin you get when 
	your M&P starts cooling, only very thin.  
I let it cool, lid on, on the stove for about another half hour, so it 
	wouldn't burn off the scent when I added it.  I added my mica
	at that point (which I probably should have held off for a minute,
	because I meant to pour a plain unscented/uncolored bar so I could
	see what the end soap looked like, plain, but I totally forgot),
	which was really pretty in the swirling soap (It was a mix of
	white sparkle, copper sparkle, and 24 karat gold micas).  After
	that, I added my scent, which was vanilla (I knew the soap was
	going to be amber-colored so I wanted a scent that would 
	complement the shade).  I poured it through a sieve into my 
	upright two-chamber mold, which holds about 5.5-6#, and filled 	
	a six-cavity (5 oz apiece) mold, and still had more left over,
	so I ran downstairs to grab another six-cavity mold.  By that 
	time, the sludge in the sieve had firmed up and the soap wouldn't
	go through anymore, so I tried poking holes in it (didn't work
	very well) and ended up just pouring the soap (with the skin-
	blobs and all) into three chambers.  So, all in all, I should
	end up with thirty something bars of beautiful sparkly vanilla
	transparent soap -- all from scratch!!  I'm so excited.
This morning, I peeked... the mica stayed nicely suspended, and the bars
	are *hard*!  I'm impressed.  I had my doubts about using so much
	castor oil (13 oz, I think) but it seems like the bars are 
	just as hard, if not harder, than my regular CP.  Also, I was
	kind of worried because the bars were 0% superfatted, and that
	makes it really important that the measures be entirely accurate.
	But the soap feels so *silky* -- I was washing the stock pot
	and just putting my hands in the soapy water made them feel
	soft and smooth.  The scraps lathered *great* (probably about
	right, with all that castor and coconut) -- lasting bubbles.
Can't wait to turn these bars out of the mold in a few days!

Thanks Alex and Tab!  Doin' the cross-country Happy Soap Dance :)


-- 
sabrina  downard ~ Madness takes its toll.  Please have exact change.
viv@ziggurat.org ~ Soapmaker's Resources: http://www.ziggurat.org/soap/

"Lead me not into temptation; I can find the way myself." -- Rita Mae Brown

So that's transparent soap. It's really cool to see the soap dissolve in the solvent-liquid. I'll definitely do it again.