I've mentioned in other threads that I have the common variety* red-green color blindness, and for me one of the side-effects is that I rarely notice color; I generally have to consciously decide to focus on colors. Anyway, in soap making, one of the results is that I haven't noticed if I have DOS on my soap very often. Thanks to folks on this thread I've realized that I got some DOS where my soap was drying on metal shelving (I've put a stop to that!) and as
@QuasiQuadrant mentioned in the DOS thread,
@AliOop helped me learn that even leaving the soap on painted or bare wood can cause problems, so now everything is on wax paper or parchment paper.
Anyway, my wife is usually the one who notices orange spots, and she says that my almond oil soap (one of the first bars I made back in April (and the one I'm showering with right now, and
loving), has the worst problem with the spots. I can't tell if this might be poorly-blended honey, poorly-blended beeswax, actual DOS from bad oil, or what. I'm keeping it for me, so I'm not worried about it, but this soap is so nice, I want to share it with people! (once I fix the ugly spots).
Anyway, I've finally used up the last of the grocery-store almond oil that I got in April and am about to break into a fresh bottle from BB. I'm hoping that the batch I make today won't have the problem. If I can make an un-spotty version consistently, I think this may be the first custom soap I put up for sale.
If I can isolate what's causing the spots, I can focus on fixing them. It is tempting to make many changes at once, but I know that's not the right testing approach, so I'll make today's test batch with the same recipe as my first two almond oil and honey batches, but new oil. If there are still spots, my next test will be to leave out the melted beeswax. If that doesn't solve it, I'll try getting a different honey, although we have SO MUCH HONEY in the house as the result of a previous hobby of my wife's (mead making) that I was hoping to use the old honey in my soap to start chipping away at it.
Anyway, this weekend's 'soapy things' list is overly ambitious, but that's just how I roll with my to-do lists.
- Weekly weigh-in on my Cure Cards.
- Make a test batch of my almond oil and honey soap with new almond oil.
- Make my next experimental high-honey recipe. This is a re-do of the 8% batch from last weekend that I ended up rebatching.
- Make my third batch of 72%-with-madder-root, making sure to blend the powder with water this time (oh, and with a bit less of a water discount).
- Try to clear out more space on my workbench.
- Send out invitation surveys to my testers.
- Set up a packing-shipping station on my dining room table.
- Pack a batch of test bars to send to my business mentor in Kansas on Monday.
- Start learning Soapmaking Friend and put in my raw materials inventory.
- If I have time, I'll start drafting my feedback survey so my testers have somewhere to give me feedback.
- If I have time, I want to make
one more another pumice batch, this time using the Blacksmith recipe I've seen mentioned here to learn about borax use. I've already started using the pumice-and-charcoal soap in my workshop, and I like it!
- I have Monday off from work, so I should probably see about setting up the open-source shopping cart on my soap site. I already had someone try buying soap on the site, though it isn't set up yet!
Soaps mentioned in the post:
Pumice and charcoal.
View attachment 73905
The rebatched honey soap.
View attachment 73906
This soap (with the bee 'medallion') was my second batch of almond oil and honey.
View attachment 73907
Finally, these are from my first almond oil and honey batch. This is based on a recipe in
Anne L. Watson's
Smart Soapmaking book. These bars lather like crazy when used with a shower scrubby, and I love them, ugly as they may be. I swear my minor skin issues have started clearing up since I began using this soap in the shower a few weeks ago.
View attachment 73908
-=-
*
Anomalous trichromatic. If you're interested, read more here:
Red-Green Color Blindness - All About Vision
that those are honey spots.
