So here's tonight's Soap Adventure:
As the lye water and oils cooled down to 90 degrees, I had everything else prepped and ready to go. Fragrance oil, ground oatmeal, pitcher for mixing in the colorant, gloves on standby. I mixed the lye water and the oil and started stirring by hand (with a spatula). Where's that stick blender? oh, over there. Grabbed that and promptly knocked over my container of measured fragrance oil. Cleaned up the spill and measured out more FO. Start blending with the stick blender and realized I had soap batter on my fingers. Wait, where's my gloves? Wash off hands, put on gloves and start blending again. My bowl is juuuuust too small for the mixture to accommodate any stick blending so I have to work in short bursts and be careful not to fling the batter out. Finally got it to light trace and poured some into my mixing cup. Added my .1 oz of purple coloring and the powder clumped up. Also, it was no longer lavender, it was deep purple. Added more batter and tried using the stick blender. Not enough batter for the blender to work, plus it was making the soap mixture thicker. I stirred that with a spatula for a while and decided it was good enough to pour into the mold. Grabbed my mold -- and there's no liner. I distinctly remember telling myself I would have plenty of time to line the mold while the lye water cooled, and then I forgot. I stripped off the gloves, grabbed the parchment paper and started wrestling with the mold. I HATE trying to line it. Actually, I did figure out a pretty easy way to line the mold while I was panicking. Alrighty, mold is lined, batter is now too thick to do my fun swirls I was planning, time to drop and plop. In went the plain batter, in plopped the purple batter. I attempted a swirl with the chopstick but that didn't turn out right. Finally I just left it alone. Then turned around and saw the ground oatmeal still sitting in it's container. Tomorrow I may be rebatching this just to smooth out that color and get the oatmeal in.
Moral of this story is: line the mold before you do the lye water. You won't remember to otherwise!
Scented with WSP's Lemon Drop Cookie FO, and I split the water in the batch and took part of it and loaded it with five different kinds of milk powder (regular milk, buttermilk, yogurt, goat milk, and coconut milk). I split off a tiny bit to do a white and yellow swirl on top, then mixed my FO into the main uncolored batch and poured that in the mold.
