Easter Soap!

Hey readers!

I am really enjoying making soap. I think it is partially because of how immediately useful it is. Making puppets is fun, but then you are left with a lot of puppets laying around your apartment like you went on a killing spree at Sesame Street. Wow. Three sentences in and I have already managed to create a word picture including murder and puppets. Damn blogging is fun - you never know where a paragraph will end up. Maybe that is more about my completely nonsensical writing style, but that is a level of introspection I am not prepared for right now.

Unlike puppet making, soap making creates soap. Only the dirtiest of people will say that they don't need soap. Lots more people will say they don't need puppets. Go ahead and take a poll. I can tell you right now the results, but in the interest of science you better give replicating my study a shot.

The other cool thing about making soap - at least the kind I am making that isn't 100% totally from scratch - is that it is really hard to make a mistake so huge that it stops being soap. That kind of leads to this blog post. I don't love how this soap came out, and we will talk about why, but it is definitely still soap.

I found these cool silicone egg molds at the store. I am not sure what you are supposed to make in them, but I am using them for soap. I suppose you could make cookies in them, but they would be a really thick cookie. Cake would work i suppose, but who wants a cake with no frosting on top - and if you did frost it there would be no need for the designs.

I need to stop trying to peer into the mind of silicone egg mold manufacturers and get back to my story. I want to make swirling patterned egg soaps using a honey soap base. Honey soap is translucent, unlike my shea butter soap from the last project.

This was going to be a linen scented soap so I had my linen scent and all my colors ready to go. I noticed that none of the scents are labeled. I suppose I can open them and quickly find out, but what if my soap projects take over my crafting and I have dozens of scents. This could become unmanageable. I suppose I could label them myself, but what is this kind of madness.

The pink colorant was particularly interesting. It has a bunch of sediment at the bottom and after shaking it for a good 10 minutes it started to mix in. This colorant has glitter! JustLeah would be so excited.

I quickly realized this project was not going to go as planned. First, I made the mistake of mixing all the colors in separate containers first. I now know it would have been easier to add the colors to the molds and mix with a toothpick. Mistake 1: I also learned that I only have two containers in my apartment that I am simultaneously comfortable putting soap in and that are microwave safe. Take note of the stack of plastic cups sitting on the corner of my sink. I could microwave the soap for a few seconds before the cups collapsed under the weight of the molten soap. I discovered that they held up better if I did two at a time, but they still could only handle the heat for less than a minute.

Microwave troubles aside, I was committed. Mistake 2: When I made the last batch of soap I wanted a pastel orange color. I used a small amount of orange colorant and the soap turned out a pastel orange color. Despite not using white soap base this time, I assumed this same strategy would work here. The issue there is, clear soap makes translucent soap. The colorant doesn't become pastel. This might seem obvious to anyone who has experienced colors before, but for some reason the thought eluded me. So I wound up with a lot of primary colored eggs. Lets just pretend it was intentional.

Now came the time to mix the soap in the egg. Mistake 3: I was trying to mimic some cool tutorials I found that were using completely different soaps. Again, you would think I could have figured out that different soaps would behave differently, but that is not the way I was thinking at the time.

So the issue was that my soap is not quite as dense as the soaps shown in those videos from the Soap Queen - which is an epic name by the way. So my soaps just kind of blended together. Not to mention that since I was not using opaque soap, you got this weird stain glass look. Fortunately, I realized this was happening almost immediately and switched from my original swirl plans back to solid colors. Only the bottom left egg in that picture even has more than one color in it. I tried taking pictures to illustrate what happened, but it just isn't reading like seeing it in person. The yellow that went in it got completely swallowed up by the darker color. Again, should have been obvious, but live and learn.

After a little time to cure I found myself surrounded by soap! While it wasn't quite what I had originally envisioned, it is still fun soap and it smells very much like fresh linen. Plus, the egg shapes make for much more hand friendly soap. The challenge now is to use it all before eggs make no sense in my bathroom.

Soap making is lots of fun, but maybe I should take back what I said at the top. Having too much soap can be just as big a problem as too many puppets, the only difference being the threshold is probably higher for soap.

I have two food based posts coming so get excited! JoshPrime is eating real food again! (I was on a cleanse and yes it was the worst.)

Keep making cool stuff!
Until next time,
JoshPrime