I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas with your families. We had a lightning storm the night before Christmas Eve and our internet modem and back up battery were cooked when lightning hit close to the house so I didn't get a chance to wish everyone a Happy Christmas.
I am continuing to make my own soap as I have oils to use up that I bought before they became so very expensive to buy. I was able to buy Coconut Oil in bulk last year so have been making a lot of 100% Coconut Oil Soap but I still have Rice Bran Oil to use up and a little Olive Oil so I made up a batch a couple of weeks ago but, for some reason, it was a monumental fail. So I decided to rebatch it.
As I am sure everyone has noticed, the cost of soap making oils has increased dramatically especially olive oil. Last year when I ran out of olive oil I dreaded having to spend a lot of money on new stock and was pleasantly surprised when I went into Coles to find that they had some large tins of oil reduced from over $30 to $6.95. I have no idea why they were reduced but I picked up two cans straight away in case they were sold quickly.
Normally we ease into winter here but this year it has arrived early....at least that is what it seems to me. I can remember the weather being quite balmy at the beginning of winter a few years ago but that is certainly not the case now. At least the sun is shining again after weeks of overcast skies and rain and there is nothing like enjoying the sunshine on a cold, frosty and crisp morning.
I hope that everyone enjoyed the Easter break. I remember when I was a child that most shops and businesses would be shut for days as it was a very sacred time but times have changed a lot since then. Gone are the days when banks were shut for so long and there was no online banking nor ATMs around which wasn't really a problem as there weren't many places open to spend money anyway. LOL!
I bought some Shea Butter last year and I thought I had better use it up in case it 'went off' although I was keeping it in the fridge. As a friend had given me a wire soap slicer last year which cost a small fortune I thought I would make a batch of soap using the Taiwan Swirl method. The soap slicer enables the soap to be cut horizontally instead of vertically. Unfortunately it didn't turn out like it did on the tutorial but it will do the same job regardless.
As it had been a couple of months since my last soapmaking session and I had supplies that needed to be used up, I made a quick and easy batch of soap which wouldn't be 'giftworthy' as I knew it would turn darker as time went on.
I have been really slack with blogging lately for some reason. However, I really need to do a post about the last two batches of soap I made as I like to record what recipe I used in case it turns out to be a particularly nice soap.
As we are now in winter I suppose we shouldn't wonder why we are having a cold snap but it does seem to have come quite early in the season this year. Down in Victoria there is flooding which is bad enough when that happens in summer but must be dreadful in winter so I hope any readers from down there are doing okay and are keeping warm although I believe a lot of people lost power for quite a long time. Here in SE Queensland it is starting to warm up a little during the day which I am very thankful for.
As I had frozen cubes of goat's milk left over from the last batch of soap I made I thought I had better motivate myself and use it up. I chose an old recipe which I think was originally from Rhonda's book 'Down to Earth' and I replaced most of the water in the recipe with goat's milk. I ran it through the Soap Calc calculator which gave me a different amount to use for the lye and also added fragrance oil to the recipe.The plan was to add micas to produce very light colours but, as you can tell from the photos, we had some drama!
I haven't made goat's milk soap for quite a while so bought some milk at the supermarket a few weeks ago and then I had to do some research on past blog posts to remember how I made the soap. LOL! I used the room temperature method this time though and wasn't as meticulous as I was in the linked post As it is necessary to keep the milk cool so that it doesn't get too hot when the lye is added I froze it as cubes first.
Recently I got the urge to make a batch of soap and seeing as I hadn't used my loaf mould for a couple of years I decided to do the 'hanger swirl' which you may have read about in the blog post The Hanger Swirl in 2017. It turned out a lot darker than I had hoped but not as dark as it looks in the photos.
In an effort to use up my out of date oils I recently made up a batch of soap using the Castile Bubbles recipe as the only oils required are olive oil and castor oil. This should turn out to be a really nice soap but the main reason I made it was to see if the dreaded orange spots appeared so that I can narrow down the cause although I doubt that the oils are rancid as they don't smell. Anyway I am quite pleased with how they turned out.
I am sure that all of you who make soap have had a few 'surprises' when using a tried and true recipe. Well, that is what happened to me last week when I was making another batch of my 100% coconut oil soap . I added a new to me fragrance oil and that is all it took to botch it up....well appearance wise anyway as the soap will probably still be good to use.
