I counted them up, I have 28 different soap recipes!  They range from just 4 days old to over 12weeks old.  I think I am ready to start using them in the shower.  I'll use the oldest first.  I want to wait until each of the soaps are at least 4 weeks old before I use them.  I plan on using each bar of soap for 3 showers to evaluate the qualities.  I'm going to have a whole line up of soaps in my shower.  I cannot have 28 different recipes in my repertoire.  I'll have to narrow down.  If I don't notice any discernible difference between recipes then I need to evaluate which ones are worth repeating.  I want to try all the soaps before I give any away just in case something is wrong with any of them.  I don't plan on making any more soap for right now, unless I have an overwhelming urge to make some, which likely will happen anyway.  However, I think I've pretty much made the different major categories of soaps that I wanted to make.

Castile
Milk
Honey
100% coconut oil
Salt Bar
Lard Bar
Whipped Soap
Coffee
Beer

Oh, the coffee soap with coffee grounds soap I made I put in WAY too much coffee grounds.  It's exfoliating to be sure, but painfully so.  I'm not sure what to do with them.  Should I leave them as is, or cut them up and rebatch them with new soap to mellow out the coffee ground ratio, or just toss them.  I'm leaning towards shredding them up and mixing them in with new soap.   But what new soap to mix them in with?  Hmmm…  I'm hoping my soap testing will narrow the choices down. 

So I cut up my milk bastile soaps.  The bars (not the tiny ones) in the photo are 3.5 inches x 2.5 in x 2 in.  I would usually cut them in half so that I'd have two 3.5×2.5×1 bars, but I wanted all the bars to have the same honeycomb on three sides.  So, I cut them into three 2.5×1.2×1.  Smaller bars, but I'd have more of them too if I wanted to give them away to more people. 

Anyway, the soap was still really too soft to cut.  I should have waited more, but that would require more patience. So they are bit sticky inside and had some sticking to the blade, like cutting through cheesecake.  I get more of the ammonia waft after I cut it, I'm sure that will mellow with time.  The non-gelled soaps had a little bit of liquid sweat on the bottom side.  Lick – slight zap, BUT I'm not rebatching this.  I'm going to chalk it up to non-gelling and I'm going to ignore it for right now and let it cure.  I'm hoping that it will absorb back into the soap and be just fine.  The gelled soaps show no sign of this lye sweating.  So they are now off to cure. 

I rebatched my confetti bastile.  It's still a confetti soap, but more of a tan beige background.  It's an interesting fragrance.  I definitely smell the peppermint.  Maybe this won't be so bad afterall.

OK, so I've unmold everything from yesterday.  The milk soaps came out really
nice.  There is a really big
difference of the colors between gelled and not gelled.  The non gelled soaps are a creamy color
while the gelled soaps where more brown. 
I'll post photos.  The
plastic bubble wrap left a texture that is really cool.  The gelled soap is much harder than the non gelled.  I probably should have left the non
gelled in their molds until tomorrow, but I couldn't wait.  I had to pop them out.  They are so soft the I dare not cut
into them tonight, I was afraid I'd squish them just moving them around.  The gelled one I probably could cut,
but I think I'll leave them until tomorrow.  The gelled milk soaps with honey is darkest.  The sugar in the honey makes the saponification run hotter which carmelizes more of the sugars so darker color. The non gelled
soaps all have the same creamy color.  I'm not
sure which color I like better. 
The cream is nice, but the tan color is also nice especially for the
honey one. Hmm… I'll need to think about that one.  But that is why I wanted to see the difference between gel and
non gel.  I usually gel all my
soaps, but I wanted to see the difference in milk and honey soaps. There is a faint ammonia smell which I'm told is normal with milk soaps and will fade with curing.  I don't think I really smell any of the honey, but there is a slight nuttiness as well.

So that's
the good news…

The bad news. 
My confetti soap.  I was so
excited to see this soap because it was in a 1/2 gallon milk carton so I
thought I'd cut them into triangles. 
Then because they are filled with trimmings from my other soaps I was
interested to see how they turned out all together.  Well, it looked interesting I think I put too many trimmings
in though.  I think it would look
better with more base batter an less confetti.  But anyway, when I cut into it there were pockets of lye
water oozing.  #$%@&*$!!  No one wants caustic soap!  I did the lick test to make sure it
wasn't just oil seeping out. 
Zap!  Tingly tongue.  So no, it's definitely
lye.  So then I cut it up and threw
it all into a crock pot to rebatch. 
Rebatching will soften the soap and heat it to go back into a gel phase
where the lye can find more oil and get used up.  When I scoop the gooey mass into a mold later it should no
longer be caustic.   So it's
cooking away now.  I have no idea
what is going to come out now.

Checked on the soap this morning.  The ones in the oven have all cooled down.  They seem pretty soft, I could press my finger into it if I put some pressure.  And they seem a bit oily.  This is interesting because the last time I made a bastile it was hard by the next day; so much so that I had to put a little weight into cutting the bars.  But then again last time I used light olive oil and a water lye mixture.  This time it was pomace olive oil and half and half milk/cream lye mixture.  Oh this time I also had to soap cool because of the cream/milk.  Last time I put in very warm lye water into warmed up oil.  I'll cut the bars when I get home this evening and hopefully the oil will absorb back into the bar during curing/drying.  These are bastile so I'm in for a LONG wait before they get really nice to use. 

I'm really curious to see how the confetti soap comes out.  My husband says it looks like vomit in the milk carton right now.  Yay.    I put more soap trimmings than olive oil in this soap, so it's full of confetti, not just a light smattering of bits in a white soap.  Also pomace olive oil comes out a little yellow in color so I may be wishing I whitened it up with some titanium dioxide.  Then again, maybe it will be just great looking!  The fragrance seems to be nice a nice mix of everything, at least it's not offensive to me.  I don't know if this will require as much curing/drying time as regular bastile because most of it is trimmings that have already gone through some curing.  Also the trimmings are not bastile so maybe it won't take as long. 

Oh, I pulled away some of the bubble wrap that I had put around the soap with honey and it looks pretty cool!

I just unmolded the 100% coconut oil salt bar it's still a little warm.  Love the Gingerfish fragrance.  The soap popped out of the mold super easy, very little left over in the mold.  Sometimes the corners get left behind in the mold.  The apple green pop mica I used to swirl came out a nice sea foam green.  As I was washing up I used a little of the trimmings and it bubbled up really nice.  Coconut oil is one of the few oils, once saponified, that can withstand high salt concentration and still create nice lather.  That's why high coconut oil percentage soaps do well as mariner soaps.  They will lather in salt water. 

I believe I will have to celo wrap or shrink wrap these soaps because of their high salt content.  The salt will draw moisture from the air and cause little beads of moisture to appear on the soap, like the melt and pour soaps.  It's not usually that humid around here but it's raining right now.  I think I'll keep them inside the house for now to cure/dry.  The central heating should keep the humidity down. 

I just finished up a soaping session.  This time I made

1. 100% coconut 20% superfat salt bar soap.  I made this just like I did my other 100% coconut oil soap, but I also added 75% of the oil weight of table salt.  I hear that the salt does great things… what I guess I'll find out next month.  It's not a scrub bar, I shouldn't feel any grit from the salt.  It's supposed to just make a nice smooth bar. 

I think the salt bar will be ready to unmold today.  I hear the salt
bars set up really quick and if you use a large mold you need to cut it
while it's still warm.  If you wait until it's cooled down cutting into
the loaf will cause it to crumble.  I put my salt bars into individual
silicone molds so I am avoiding the short window for cutting salt bars.
I also used Gingerfish fragrance oil.  Mmmmm… smells like ginger ale or Sprite.  Yummy, refreshing smell.

2. Basic bastile soap (90% pomace olive oil/10% castor oil) and I threw in a bunch of my trimmings from other soap batches.  So the color and fragrance comes from all of the colored trimmings and their fragrances.  I put this one in a 1/2 gallon milk carton.  I think I'll cut these into triangles.  I'm not sure what kind of fragrance is going to come out since it's a mix of a bunch of differently fragranced soap bits.  Hopefully it's going to be a nice mix…

3.  Basic bastile (90% OO/10% castor) made with half and half instead of water.  So a basic milk soap.  I've read that milk, whether it's cow or goat, adds a nice creaminess and gentle quality.  Since bastiles are already a nice mild soap, adding the half and half should make it even nicer.  I put half of the batch in the freezer to prevent gel and half in the oven to gel.  I am curious to see the difference.  Usually gelled milk soaps come out darker in color as the sugars in the milk carmelize.  Preventing gel should prevent too much carmelization, but it will take a little longer before I can unmold and the saponification process will take longer, like in the whipped soaps.

4. Basic bastile and half and half with some honey added.  Honey and cream soap. The addition of sugar, whether honey, white sugar, molasses, etc. adds more lather to a bar.  So I thought I'd add some honey.  I don't think the smell of the honey will survive the lye process, but I'll see.  I also used some bubble wrap to create a sort of honey come texture to the soaps.  I also put half of the batch into the oven and half into the freezer.  The addition of sugars also makes the batter really heat up.  If one isn't careful one could not only caramalize the sugars, but also burn the sugars and come out with a really dark brown, burnt sugar soap.

So today I cut up yesterdays soaps.  The unfragranced 25% and 50% lard soaps have no piggy or baconny smell; at least to me.  I really wish I had gotten a sample of the 70% lard soap before I mixed in the FO.  Too bad, but I don't think that one would have smelled any more porky than the 25% or 50% ones. 

I love cutting the soap logs.  There is something so satisfying about the feeling of cutting into the semi-hard/semi-soft logs, to see how the color swirling turned out, and to know that I made soap.  I really do think I like making soap more than I like using it.  I have only one body and I take only one shower a day, but I can make up a bunch of different batches of soap with different colors and fragrances.  It's so much fun.

I posted new photos to soap.

Lard soaps                                        non-lard Yuzu fo                               group shot
   

I have been playing around with melt and pour soap (also known as glycerin soap).  It's easy because I cut up chunks of already made soap base, melt it in the microwave, add fragrance and color, then pour into molds.  Once the soap is cooled and hard I can just pop them out of the mold and they are ready to use.  No need to wait weeks for curing/drying like in cold process or hot process soap making. 

I recently got some shot glass molds.  They are intended to make ice shot glasses, but I saw somewhere where they were used to make soap.  I thought I'd try.  I got 2 different kinds.  At Bed Bath and Beyond I got a 2 piece hard plastic molds, 12  molds in the pack.  These are really hard to unmold.  Because the plastic is hard it has no flexibility.  I had to bang and twist, put it in the freezer, bang and twist, bang and twist several times before I was able to pop them out of the mold.  The second mold I got is silicone.  After a couple of attempts to get it online, both times they were sold out after I made the purchase, I finally found it in a cooking supply store Santa Cruz.  This is so much easier to unmold.  It's a one piece mold with 4 cavities.  The glasses are a bigger than the hard plastic mold. 

Anyway I made shot glasses and the “shots” to go in them.  I left the soap clear for the “glasses” then colored the “liquid”.  I put fragrance in both clear and colored so the entire soap would have scent.   For the “liquid” in  the first shot in the hard plastic mold I used an opaque colorant so it's looks weird.  I don't know what kind of drink would be opaque burgundy color.  I fragranced it with Black Cherry, smells sort of like cough syrup.  The silicone shots I used Strawberry Jam fragrance and Bramble Berry's Non-Bleeding Red for the liquid.  Looked really cool.  But when I looked at the shot today, the red coloring had bled to the clear glass, so the entire soap has a red haze to it.  That's so disappointing.  If you look at the photos, the red shot used to look like the green and orange one.  Well, I went ahead and made a couple more today anyway.  I used Lime Mint fragrance with Emerald colorant and Grapefruit with Marigold colorant (it's actually meant for cold process, but I tried anyway).  The Marigold came out more orange, I probably should have used an orange fragrance instead of grapefruit.  Oh well.  

I'm sure these shots will bleed through as well.  I'm glad I got photos of them before that happens.  Colorants like oxides and micas won't bleed in melt and pour soaps, but they make the clear soap opaque, so it doesn't look like a translucent drink anymore. 

Oh, I tried the smaller shot and it lasted about 9 showers.