April 8, 2000

My entire life has been turned upside-down since I went back to school last fall. I've decided I'm taking the summer off. You know, it would be great to have my degree in 13 years instead of 15, but hey, sometimes I have to just live a little. ;-)

I had to throw away a batch earlier this week. What a bummer. I was so disappointed. It was an experimental batch, and I screwed up my measurements so it was way, way superfatted and, as if that wasn't enough, it had dairy products in it (either whipping cream or full-fat yogurt, can't remember right now). It was pretty clear that the dairy was going bad. What a bummer. I really liked the FO, too. And they were such a pretty white bar with a great green swirl, too. Sigh. Well, I learned a valuable lesson. Here's what happened....

So I wanted to see what the discernible difference was between soaps made with (a) buttermilk, (b) full-fat yogurt, (c) whipping cream, or (d) goatsmilk was. So I figure, I'll make four identical batches except switch which dairy product I use for the liquid in each batch. No problem. I made a large 12-pound recipe, figured out how much water, measured out my dairy products and stuck them in the freezer to get slushy, melted all my oils, and go ready to make the first two batches. But, what I didn't realize was: The addition of the lye to the water changed its weight. What happened was, the recipe recommended (let's pick a nice easy number) 64 oz. liquid. So I measured half of that in water: 32 oz. Added my lye. We'll say it called for 25 oz (I don't remember exactly, but that's a nice number). Dumped the 25 oz lye in the 32 oz water, dissolved, let cool, all that jazz. Then when I got ready to mix, I measured out my 48 oz. of oils into my soappot, and then I made my critical error. I figured, 32 oz. of water means I need 8 oz for this batch. So I measured 8 oz of the lye-water. That means I didn't use nearly enough lye-solution. What I should have done was add the lye to the water and then re-measure that weight and divided *that* by four to get how much to use for each set of oils. Errrgh. That was a sort of expensive experiment. After I made two of the four batches I realized my mistake ("Gee, how come I have all this extra lye-water? Oh, %^&*^%&*(%^@#!!!") and ended up pitching the lye water (hey, the laundry sink drains much better now). Finally used the rest of the oils in ordinary batches and they came out okay. Sheeeesh. So, chalk one up for stupid user error.