New Soaps, first colors/swirls

[seven]

Drop swirls are my favourite kind of swirls. They're so dramatic and you never know exactly what you're gonna get until you cut!

Exactly! Which makes it worse for me as i have no patience... I just wanna cut cut cuuuttt and see what's inside

 

[Tienne]

Me too! That's what I always use SL no matter what and love CPOP'ing. I need to cut the soap as soon as humanly possible! 6-8 hours max is all I can bare to wait before unmolding and cutting. I made a shampoo bar last week that was in the mold for 36 hours! That was a first! And a last! Never again I tell you. Never! It's just too damn long a wait!

 

[Lin]

6-8 hours?!?! WOW. I actually meant to put SL in the avocado soap but forgot. I couldn't cut it until 2 days, at 24 hours it was still too soft. After the second day though there was no way I was waiting any longer and cut it despite it still being soft, I wouldn't have been able to with a knife but the wire cheese cutter worked great. I put salt in the yogurt and cucumber one but it was quite soft still too and I had to start cutting it with a knife which wasn't going well so I had to stop and wait to finish. I had salt in the basil soap too, a larger amount plus it had less liquid so I didn't have any problems with cutting that one at 48 hours.

Once I get more lye I'll try out a batch with SL, I want to compare it to salt. Since salt is cheaper if I don't notice much of a difference I'll go with that. But since I use such soft recipes I'm thinking about always adding salt/sl to help them firm up faster.

Oh, and interestingly the purple in my yogurt and cucumber was pink at 24 hours! I used a pale purple ultramarine from BBs oxide sampler, but also added in some blue food coloring after I got such a gorgeous purple from experimenting with that. It was fun to watch the multiple color changes as I stick blended it. When it was still pink at 24 hours I assumed it would stay that way, but on the third day it was purple. I'm glad I added the blue food coloring, I think it would have been way too pale with ultramarine alone.

 

[seven]

watching the color changes can be fun... until you had a perfect color scheme in your head and used an untested mica (green) which turned purple the next day, LOL! these days (altho i'm lazy), i try to make it a habit to test every new colorants i received to make sure there aren't any (ahem) surprises

 

[Saponista]

This sounds mean, but I'm glad to hear that other people go through lots of problems when trying to create new soaps and it's not just me being rubbish.

 

[Lin]

Yea, I was sad when it was still pink! I was hoping it would change but getting doubtful at 24 hours. When I went to cut it and saw it was finally purple I was very excited.