Got two batches of soap in progress at the moment, both 500g batches. One is intended to be soap dough, so is unscented and uncolored for now. The other is going into the new small slab mold I found on ebay. It's 6 inches square on the inside and close to two inches deep. Depending on how thick I pour I should either get 4 square bars or six chunky bars. Planning on red/orange/yellow swirls for that one, coloring with iron oxides. I don't really have much in the way of spicy EOs to use in it, though, to match the fall colors, so went with orange, patchouli and a touch of lemongrass.
Next day-ish (I have a weird schedule)- Soap dough seems to have about the texture of sugar cookie dough, the kind you can roll out and cut. I lined the mold I poured it into with a freezer bag, and after it sat just long enough to firm up a bit in the mold I closed the bag up, and am going to let it sit (mostly) undisturbed for at least another full day. Lifting out the bag and poking at it from time to time... that doesn't count as disturbing it, right? As long as I don't open the bag?
The red, orange and yellow soap is looking good. I spritzed it with alcohol and covered the top of the mold with plastic wrap and have left that alone. So far, there doesn't seem to be ash forming. Unless I see it starting to ash, I'm going to leave it alone, too, for another day. This recipe stays soft enough to cut easily for two or three days out of the mold, so I don't have to be in any hurry.
And I finally got my raw meat soap grated up and in the crock pot to rebatch again. I added most of my orange peel batch, too (in an effort to offset adding WAY too much iron oxide in the first rebatch) so there's between three and four pounds of soap there. I also added 3/4 teaspoon of activated charcoal to hopefully make it look less like raw meat when I'm done with it. I used my food processor to grate the soap up, with the smallest shred blade. Worked fairly well. Took about as long to set up, use, and clean the food processor as it would have to grate the soap by hand I think, but there was considerably less effort in using the processor.
Further update regarding the rebatch- the raw meat is now cooked meat! Huzzah! Um. Or something. I smooshed the grated soap into balls, between 2" and 3" in diameter. Didn't really want to mess with trying to get it into a mold and cut, especially since it wasn't really getting very melty. It seems to have stuck together fairly well, I'll check and see how much structural integrity my giant soap meatballs have in a few days.
I spent half an hour updating my soap binder, adding pics of each batch and making sure all of my notes were fully up to date.
