Good Morning!!
Had a crazy fun night last night celebrating a friend's birthday, haha we always tend to get into shenanigans when we get together for an extended period of time (more than an hour haha). Anyway, what a beautiful day this has turned out to be. Sunny and lovely! Butterflies and birds are twitterpating! I'm sitting on my patio, Beatles on in the background, and coffee in hand - seemed like the appropriate time to pen my next Snoozie Butter blog post. Onto it then ...
First successful Cold Process Soap
After my first real soap (see previous post), I was a little gun shy about trying again and made certain I had all of the best ingredients (ie: fragrance oil that won't seize up my batter). I finally had everything and was ready to go.
It's hard to fully describe the feeling of creating something like this from scratch. There is something that happens with the make up of my body, like my neurons in my brain start firing differently and the serotonin takes over and then ..... I am lost in my creative state for hours. Many nights I am working in my little Snoozie Butter office after work, and time is just not present. In fact I typically don't usually realize how long I have been up there until B brings up some dinner and says "working hard dear?" And I realize 3ish hours have passed. It's so very therapeutic, even when I make mistakes - yes they are devastating, but worth it!
So when I finally had everything I needed to make this pretty pretty thing that I can actually use, and was made with such awesome products - the serotonin set in immediately!! I decided to stick with my initial simple recipe - nothing extra - just simple soap: Olive Oil, Coconut Oil, Caster Oil, Sodium Hydroxide, Distilled Water and Fragrance Oil. I later tweaked it a bit to add more creaminess and make it a little softer with Shea Butter and Sweet Almond Oil. This was a really good hand soap though. *Sidebar - I ended up making too much for my mold so I had to pour some into additional small molds as well.
Once everything was combined - oils and lye water - fragrance oil (I suspect the look on my face was pretty cringy as I was dreading this after the first debacle lol) and the trace (all things are fully emmulsified and oils and water can no longer separate) was good. I split up the batter and added mica to the smaller portion to create a pretty purple.
The Swirl
This is the part I was soooooooooo looking forward to. I had watched endless videos with soapers adding swirls, drop swirls - chop stick figure eights - the swirling tool that looks like a hanger stretched out - you name it and I've watched it! For this one I went for the pour and chop stick. So you pour a big part of the base white, and then start alternating purple - white - purple - white until your mold is filled. Then using your chop stick at one end of the mold - dip it in about half way and make figure eights to the other end. Once the batter is thick enough, you can then play with decorating the top using the back of a spoon making scoops, and layers of ridges to prettify it. Pop it into a box, close it up, set a blanket on top and let it be for a couple of days. Then you're ready to cut and let it saponify.
For the first try with all the right ingredients, I think it turned out pretty! Very exciting indeed!
Ok, off to get some lilac bushes with the hubby for the front yard, and then settling in with our pups for a lovely day. Go enjoy this day! As John Lennon said "Life is what happens when you're making other plans." So go out there and enjoy every moment.
Until next week
xo Margie