Busy week

OK...so a lot has happened this week...I'll try my best to summarize. I made three batches of soap...wanted to do more but ran out of coconut oil - note to self: have two bins, when one runs out go an buy another...that way I'll always have some. Anyways, I made some straight up honey soap which seems to workbetter than honey oats or honey milk and oats - no fragance on this one except for the natural honey.

I also made some lavender soap. I recently switched to another brand of EOs and they seem to be stronger smelling - which I like. I also resolved to not care about cost when it comes to fragrance...meaning to go for medium to strong smelling soap. In the lavender batch I did just that and it came out smelling wonderful. Remamber the test I did with the vegetable colorant? Since it turned out such a wonderful purple I went ahead and used it for this batch. It turned out purple on the edges and blue on the inside! I have no idea why...I'm guessing either the cocoa butter, sunflower oil or lavender EO had something to do with it because that is all that changed from the test recipe. It still looks very nice though.

 While doing these two test batches I kept noticing how the bottom of each bar cracks a little when cutting it. I ran the recipe through soap calc and it gave me a full 2 oz more of water (I usually use MMS calc). So for my next batch I increased the water a little and it seemes to help...though the soap lookes too "wet" for my taste when I cut it.

I made carrot soap...and boy that carrot was used to the last bit. I first extracted the juice and added at trace along with some of the pulp. It colored the soap a nice orange color which turned out pretty nice. Since I had so much pulp left I made some carrot muffins...they were so yummy the kids didn't mind eating them even though they had nasty Mr. orange carrot - my daughter has this thing about orange food. I had also processed some aloe vera for the soap but it didn't actually work so well as it just made some green gunk at the bottom of the bin...so I didn't include it in the soap....and I couldn't bring myself to putting it in with the muffin batter either. So I offered my mother in law a hair mask! She was delighted. So while the muffins were cooking she got a nice salon treatment :-) She is currently nursing a broken ankle at my house...so any extra pampering is very much appreciated.

So that was my first week of the year...a lot busier than other weeks. How was yours?

P.D. Need to take better pics of soaps...these are horrible!

xoxo

Irene

Published with Blogger-droid v2.0.2