First batch of soap for the year

Do you procrastinate? Well, I have to admit to procrastinating this year about making a batch of soap for some reason. I was given some Melt and Pour soap which doesn't use lye as that process has been done already and I have kept procrastinating about making it for ages and I still haven't made any. So I can understand those of you who are hesitant to try to make your own soap for the first time. 

 That said, apparently it is really easy to make Melt and Pour soap as you just have to melt it and pour it into the moulds. However, as I haven't made it before I have been hesitant as firstly I wanted to find out how to add colour and fragrance but you can get really confused if you read about different methods of doing something and I find it is better to just stick to one method when learning a new skill. I said all that to excuse myself for not having made the soap I think. LOL!

Anyway, seeing as I was a wuss I went back to what I know how to do which is making soap with lye which is easy as long as you have a healthy respect for the lye. I often make soap using recipes from Jan Berry's Simple Natural Soapmaking so used a recipe I have tried before as I wanted to use up some of my oils before they got to their 'use by' date. I only had a little almond oil and sunflower oil as well as some fragrance oils that really needed to be used so I ran the recipe through Soap Calc which is one of the soap calculators you can use to determine the correct amount of lye and water to use with certain quantities of oils. I will put the recipe at the end of the post for my future reference as I won't know until I have used the soap after six weeks or so of curing if I am happy with it.

I also had a little Pansy Mica left but obviously used too much and also added Pink Lemonade Mica to some of the soaps. It was a bit of an experiment which didn't quite work out as I had hoped and ended up with quite a few air bubbles as well but that happens sometimes. I was fairly stressed before I poured the soap into the moulds as I had prepared everything the night before and then in the morning I added the lye to the water.....then I discovered I hadn't weighed out the coconut oil. Have you ever tried to get coconut oil out of a bottle on a cold morning. Well, it isn't easy but in the end I had to put the bottle into a container of hot water just to melt the oil so I could weigh it.

It was a bit like the pea and ham soup I recently made in the crock pot and an hour before we were to eat it I discovered I had left out the bacon bones. Dear me!

I'd better write the recipe before I forget:

454g coconut oil
794g lavender infused olive oil
35g   sunflower oil
114g castor oil
9g     almond oil
534g water
201g lye
44g   fragrance oil - a combination of Peony Rose, Egyptian Amber and Lavender and Lime
1t     pansy mica
1t     pink lemonade mica

I usually buy myself a chrysanthemum for Mother's Day but I didn't see any I liked at Bunnings or Mitre 10 and was surprised to find this beauty for $6 at Big W. I took a photo of it so that I would remember how beautiful it was before it started being chomped on as there are so many insects making mayhem in gardens at the moment and I am not the only one that is happening to. I heard on ABC radio this morning that it is due to the rain we had earlier on in the year. 

So without further ado I will wish all the mums out there a most wonderful Mother's Day tomorrow and I hope it will turn out to be a very special day for you. Some of you will be able to have a visit from your family due to some travel restrictions here in Queensland being eased for the day to enable people to visit their mothers. So do enjoy being with your family and hopefully we will be back to normal by this time next year.