April 15, 2003

So I woke up at three AM today and finally gave up and got out of bed at 3:30. Did my taxes and got ready for work, which took me through 'til 5AM. I don't normally leave for work until somewhere after 8. What to do with all that extra time? Make soap, of course. Make /weird/ soap. And what else can come of weird soap but a story?

And with that intro, I give you today's diary entry, which I'm titling:

Embarassing True Tales of the Home Soapmaker, Part VI:
Having Lye Under Your Fingernail Really, Really Sucks

As if it being tax day isn't bad enough, for some reason I woke up this morning at 3AM and couldn't get back to sleep. I ended up getting up at 3:30 and messing around with my taxes, getting the state return e-filed and the US return ready to pop in the mail when the post office opened, took a shower and got ready for work. Which meant that I was done and bored by 5 AM. :) So I decided to make a batch of soap!

I've been wanting to try and do a complex swirl for a couple of weeks now, something with two or more colors. So I decided I'd do a swirl in my "8#" tray mold.

Yesterday I also got some sodium lactate, which I bought to give it a try because a number of people are singing its praises... it's supposed to speed trace, make your soap harder, and add emollient properties. I ordered that last week and the mailman brought it yesterday, so it was time to try that as well.

I used my same recipe that I always use, which is a tad heavy on the stearic acid, which can also speed trace up and heat the soap up a bit.

Now, you guys are probably saying, "But Sabrina, wait! That violates the Scientific Method -- only change one thing at once! Swirl /or/ sodium lactate, not both!" And you would all be much smarter than me. =)

So I made my eight pounds of soap. Eight pounds is a /lot/ of soap, you know? :) I mixed the lye and water and dissolved a bit of silk in it like I always do, and I melted down the solid oils on the stove and then added the liquid oils to them to cool them down. I added the sodium lactate to the lye water and went to mix that into the oils. WHAM! Instant trace. Not a seize, thank goodness, but it was pretty definitely traced. A nice pudding consistency. I knew I was going to have to work fast. Did that make me stop and think "Maybe I should abandon the swirl idea and just go with one color?" No. Of course not. Don't be silly. =) I divided the soap base up into four bowls. Had I been thinking straight (Ok, I'm going to cut myself some slack considering I woke up so early) I would have mixed up my colors in a little oil before I got started, but I wasn't, so after I divided the soap base up into the four bowls I realized I had to mix my colors up. So I used four little custard dishes and mixed a little bit of hydrated chromium oxide green, green oxide, ultramarine rose, and dark ultramarine blue up with a little olive oil, one color in each bowl. Then i added the colors to the soap base and started stirring. And stirring. And stirring. Lots of stirring. Very much stirring. =)

I almost forgot to mention the fun part. Yeah, that's not the fun part yet. :)

I love grapeseed oil. I use it pretty heavily. So I buy it by the pail. The 50# pail. ... I live on the third floor, in a walk-up flat. And the oil, which I brought home on Sunday, I actually left in the trunk of the car, because I had two 35# pails to carry up plus 60# of kitty litter, and I had to do laundry on Sunday too (laundry in the basement). So I was kind of exhausted from carrying heavy things up and down stairs all day and didn't want to deal with that 50# pail. So I was measuring out all of my liquid oils and realized I didn't have any grapeseed oil because it was out in the car. And where was the car? Well, the car was in the nearest parking spot I could find when I was parking, of course -- the car was 3/4 of a city block away.

I'm happy to say that it only took me fifteen minutes to get the oil from the car into the soap room, but it was a pretty sweaty fifteen minutes. And I'm excused from weight-lifting this week. =)

Anyways, stirring. Right, so I got the soaps all colored and ready to add the FO, which I had saved until last in case it caused any thickening or anything. (What else could go wrong?) Did I mention it was also the first time I was going to use this particular FO in CP? Ok, three new things in one batch. Clearly, I'm either an idiot or an optimist. :) So I split the FO up and added a bit to each bowl and stirred it like crazy -- two bowls at a time (one bowl per arm) -- until it was all integrated. Then I went to actually pour the soap into the mold.

Did I say pour? I meant glop. We're talking very-nearly HP glop consistency. Thiiiiiiiick goo.

Plus, my "eight-pound" mold? Only held about 2/3 of the batch of soap. Fortunately, I actually have two of those molds. Only one of them was set up, but the other was clean and just in the other room. So I poured the colors into the first mold and swirled them up, and set that mold aside, and went to put the rest of the soap into the other mold.

So now I have two huge molds full of soap that hopefully will turn out well. And it's after nine, so the post office is open, and I gotta go mail my taxes. =) One of the things about sodium lactate is that it's supposed to make it so that you can unmold much faster (like, 8-12 hours instead of 24-48), so we'll see how this stuff looks when I get home from work today.

--sabrina, 9:07 AM

Update:

ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow.

ow.

I wrote up the diary entry and puttered around, put on my work clothes, earrings, washed my hands about a million times, put all the dirty soap dishes either in the stove (away from curious kitties) or in the sink for the harmless/no lye stuff, got my taxes and my magazine to read in line at the post office, and set out. I made it all of about a block -- which was only about 20 yards short of the post office -- before I realized that my right ring finger hurt. Since I'm a nailbiter, my sort of first reflex upon finger pain is "put it in your mouth." Lye zap!

What?

I'm honestly somewhat bemused about this. I don't know how it managed to get there. Since it was a bigger and more complex batch of soap than I usually make (I usually do one or two 3# batches at a time), I wore all of my safety gear -- glasses, cuffed gloves, even my lab coat with long sleeves. Normally I pretty much just wear the gloves while making my lye solution, and glasses the whole time. I mean, I even wore my gloves through cleanup. So it had to work pretty hard to manage to get under my fingernail.

Anyways, needless to say, I turned on my heel -- literally -- and went back home. (Walking at a slightly faster pace, this time. =) Cold running water + lemon juice = sweet sweet relief. Had to cut the fingernail off though, to make sure the lemon juice got to the burned area. :( Add a little bit of rose balm and a bandaid and I'm out the door, back en route to the post office, MacWorld in hand to keep me from staring blankly at the walls while in line. Mailed the taxes, made it to work, and now the only problem is that it's really hard to type with this stupid bandaid. =)

--sabrina, 10:47AM

Update:

Well, folks, looks like it's a goner. A thin and caustic liquid separated out of it, and it's full of little air pockets where I cut it (and conceivably it could be full of little lye pockets inside the soap), so I'm going to toss it. Waaaaah! It turned out awfully pretty though. Check out some pictures here.

--sabrina, 9:03 PM