What oils make whitest soap? And peppermint EO ?s

[Lin]

I'll type more later, long day so I'm super exhausted now and going to bed. But I wanted to ask, with the 2 soaps that are in the pringles cans in the freezer do I still unmold them after 24 hours? Or should I wait longer? I've never stuck any in the freezer before. Thanks!

 

[lsg]

Twenty fours hours should be enough if the soaps were far enough apart to get good air circulation and cooling, but it won't hurt the soap to wait a little longer.

 

[Lin]

GAH. Well I typed a super long post here and lost it I'll try to redo it...

These weren't my very first soaps, but I'm still really new. I've actually been researching soap making for a few years as I made other skin care products for myself. I got into that mostly because I couldn't afford to buy them, and used really the most simple of ingredients to clear up my eczema. For making soap I don't use colorants or scents. No FOs at all, and I do use EOs for other things but limited there as well because I'm sensitive to smells and get headaches and nausea.

But after making some skin care stuff at my bfs apartment a couple weeks ago he got really interested, and wants to start making stuff too and eventually sell it. So we made these soaps together. He's ordered a mens frangrance sampler pack and oxide colorants sampler pack from brambleberry but they're super behind. With his added interest, I started thinking about making soaps as gifts and thats where the colorants and scents came from this time.

So we made 3 soaps, and have one to go. We made the pumpkin soap, a green slab of soap for imbed trees, and the starlight soap. Unfortunately the starlight soap got messed up, so only the bottom half is starlight. I had planned to pour at a very light trace, but instead started second guessing and worrying about bleeding after I removed the dividers and so I ended up blending the batter to a medium trace, and then about halfway through had difficulty pouring, and couldn't cleanly remove the dividers so I just squeezed the soap down off the divider star after removed. I'll go ahead and do it again when the oxides arrive, it just won't be for christmas. But since I know exactly where I went wrong and everything else was perfect.

The pumpkin soap has a hole in the very top center lol, I forgot to remind my bf to make sure to get the air bubbles out before sticking it in the freezer. I had just kept reminding him to stick it in the freezer as soon as he poured it, and was doing something else while he did it. Oh well, the top piece will be his bar haha. He was actually driving me nuts during that soap. He did great mixing the lye into the frozen pumpkin and that went perfect, but he got antsy with how long it took to trace. The stick blender started to get warm too. So he kept saying he didn't think it was going to work, we should just throw it out! I was like NO, we are not wasting ingredients, everything is fine, just keep blending. So then he starts questioning me saying was this an exact recipe I got, or one of the ones that I made myself. I said I made it myself. So then he starts giving me looks and repeating that he thinks its not going to work and we should toss it! I angrily replied that WORST case scenerio, if we couldn't get it to trace at all we would still pour it and see what happened because we weren't throwing out good ingredients (especially ones I paid for!) So seriously like 90 seconds later it traced, and he switched to saying "See, and you wanted to throw it out... I told you everything would work out " and then apologized for being an ass and gave me a kiss

The green tree one looks perfect though. I used celery, I ended up not using the basil oil but I kinda wish I used that too for a bit more green. I had soaked each in some olive oil and compared the greens. The celery was a lot more bright and I started second guessing that the basil might make it brown. I had gotten basil because of seeing someone elses green soap from basil that looked nice. But I'm still really happy with it, only thing I'd change is to get MORE celery to have soaked in the oil for color. I strained the celery herb out but it left tiny green specs from the smallest pieces and I went ahead and added back in some larger pieces that were soft. The photo doesn't do it justice. Its a rather soft soap with a lot of olive and no palm so I'm waiting still before cutting it into the trees. The pringles ones were in the freezer for 24 hours, now in the fridge for maybe another 24 before we cut them just to be safe. I'm nervous about them working well since I've never done the pringles cans before.

 

[Lin]

Weird, I couldn't include the photo as it said I had 5 or more photos in the post! It was just the one. So, trying again.

 

[dixiedragon]

That celery one looks great! I have never tried celery. Can you explain what you did? From your description you infused some olive oil with celery. Did you use the celery stalk, fresh leaves, or maybe dried leaves. (I've never seen dried celery leaves, but maybe somewhere, that's a thing.)

 

[cmzaha]

I size my recipe so I use an entire can of milk, just b/c I don't really want the rest of the can of milk floating around in my fridge. You can buy canned goat milk at the store. My Publix has it.

Note: you wanted evaporated milk, NOT sweetened milk![/QUOTE]

I always freeze my extra milk whether canned or fresh in ice cube trays, as I do all my purees

 

[Lin]

I think it is the leaves. I bought a bottle of celery in the herbs section, rather small bottle. I dumped the entire bottle into a little plastic container that had a good twist on lid. Then I mostly filled the tiny container with olive oil. I left it overnight, shaking it now and then. When I was getting ready to soap I also set it in some hot water to see if adding heat got anything more out of it and it sat there until I was just about ready. Then I strained it the way you would do an oil infusion. The oil that was left had the smallest of the green specs from the herb and was a really strong green color. It was olive oil I used, so then I just used that oil and added some plain olive oil to get to my full amount of olive oil for the soap. I also tried to pick out more of the herb to mix in that was soft, as most of the celery are these tiny hard pieces. The oil that was soaked was really this night bright vibrant green, so like I said I really wish I had bought more of it. I think soaking all of the oil in it overnight would have made an awesome strong green. But this is good enough for my purposes Its a pale green all over, with the strong green pieces mixed in. So it could look like snow covered trees

 

[Lin]

Ok, another picture for you guys! This is just the pumpkin soap and the trees cut. I had 2 tree cookie cutters, I originally wanted to use the smaller one but I didn't like how they were coming out. It may have been because the smaller cutter was plastic, vs the metal cutter of the larger one. The one tree that doesn't have the darker green is because I was seeing which I liked better for the top, the top of the bottom and prefered the "top" to be the top with the darker green. Since they're going to be imbed on the top of my goats milk soap the bottom won't show. The soap also ended up being much thicker than planned! Which was also why the smaller plastic tree wasn't working. It was supposed to be only about 1/2 inch thick but was twice as thick. Not sure what happened there, I had given my bf the molds and the equation to determine the amount of oils for me for each mold while I was putting together the recipes. So the goats milk bars with the trees inside are going to be pretty huge!

I still need to cut the peppermint, I'm about to go do that actually. It spent 24 in the freezer, 22 in the fridge, and a couple at room temp but I felt it was too soft so decided to leave it at room temp for another day.

I'm REALLY happy with how the pumpkin turned out. I can't wait to try it out. And you can see which bar was the top where it collapsed in the center from not tapping out the air. I smoothed it as best I could, and theres a hole in the center on the other side of it as well. I put the better looking side up for now. I tried a scrap of the green soap and my bf said he thought the lather looked like it would work well for a shaving soap, which is something he said he wants to develop a good recipe for. So we'll see how the lather is for that too once its cured! I have a bunch of scraps.

The color of the picture isn't exact, I only had my phone with me and it made a weird yellowish tinge in the center of the photo.



I'd love to hear what you guys think! The pumpkin rounds remind me of cheese lol.

 

[Lin]

And here's my Starlight soap. Like I said only half turned out Starlight, but that's still 3 for gifts. As you can tell each soap was a small batch, I didn't make big ones. I'm also posting a picture of how I did it in case anyone is curious. Make sure to keep it at a light trace though, that was how I messed up mine. Pouring too thick also made the dividers move and the sections were no longer even (I'm a bit OCD!). I cut 5 strips of Posterboard that were the width of the pringles can diameter. Each one was then folded in half very crisply, and then taped together. Once the pringles can was lined at the bottom and sides the star was inserted and positioned.

 

[seven]

I really liked the idea of the starlight soaps, might just try it myself, so thanks for the inspiration

Your soaps look pretty... My fave are the christmas trees, with the natural coloring