November 1, 1998

Not much to do today. Got home from visiting family downstate. I got lots of hugs from Steve's 1-1/2-year-old nephew. :) (I think I must look like I have mommy's hair or something similar...but it's still kind of neat to have kids just wander up and give me hugs or plunk down with a book for me to read...:)

So we got home and they cancelled X-Files!! The nerve of FOX!! How dare they .. even if it *was* a rerun :P Oh well, that means it's soapin' time.

Well, earlier in the day I had bought some helper shelves at Wally World.. little steel shelves, about 5" high, 8" wide, and 16" long, covered with vinyl. I used those to double the soap-stacking space on 2 of my soap drying shelves. They seem to be working out well... well, not that I have every single surface covered with soaps but I have a lot of it covered.....:) So far, what I have curing is..

• the original plain white lard soap (about 15 bars?)
• the Lavender Blossom soap (6 bars -- traded 1, using 1, gave 1 away)
• rebatched lard soap w/ Fuzzy Peach FO and cornmeal (6 bars)
• rebatched lard soap w/ Mango Pear FO (2 "bars" and lots of misshapen bits, that's the last time I leave my soap in a bowl for a mold!)
• oatmeal/honey soap (~20 bars?)
• lavender glop soap (18 bars)

I also unmolded some of my newest stuff, my citrusy scented olive-coconut soap. I can't decide whether to call it "Morning Soap" or "Wake-up Soap" or something more jazzy like "Citrus Tango" or something. But at any rate, it's a citrus scent that I came up with and blended myself. I made 4 bars in a square mold with a celtic knot design, 6 rectangular bars in a "family size" mold, and the rest (about 9 bars' worth) is still in a pyrex glass dish drying a bit more. It smells really yummy -- I hope the scent doesn't fade too quickly. Anyways, I decided to let it sit out a little longer to harden so it doesn't pick up any bits of other soaps and get them embedded in it.

I placed another order with Liberty Natural. They didn't ship my Clary Sage EO out, and I forgot to order Cedarwood EO, so I had a good excuse. :) So I ordered several items from them, and hopefully they'll all ship out soon...

I also trimmed my oatmeal-honey bars up. They had kind of slanted curvy edges which I trimmed off to make squarish/rectangular bars. They're kind of smallish, actually, which was a little disappointing, but at least now I know that if I want square sides from bars molded in the gutter lengths, I'm going to get square bars. I should also mold them deeper to kind of compensate for how much gets chopped off.

I took the cut off edges and put them in a stainless steel mixing bowl and put it in the oven. The lowest our oven goes is 200 degrees F. I didn't really notice how long it was in there, probably about 2 hours. I sprinkled a little water on it -- not much! -- but just enough to keep it moist. It eventually got most of the soap melted down, and I put (pushed, really) it into a saran-wrap lined pyrex dish. It was stiff so I kind of squared off the sides by pulling the saran wrap tight. Then I shut off the lights, dumped the bowl in the sink, and went to bed. :)