Rebatch revisited

Remember the Rosemary&Peppermint soap from the mold failure post? Well here it is rebatched. It looks really good for a rebatched soap! I cooked it in the crock for 4 hours and 30 minutes so there should not be shrinkage later. After that amount of time, the soap assumes a consistently very simular to hot process soap. When I put this in a mold, I did not leave any excess and the top was bumpy. I like soap with straight edges so I cut off the "crown" and got a shorter bar. Another soap I wanted to rebatch, I made sure I overfilled the mold to get a significant "crown" on top so I can cut this and get regular sized bars. More on this later.

This soap was real heavy on the peppermint so I was able to drive alot of it off and add a little more rosemary EO to bring about some herbal balance. After a week or so I will be able to shower up and see how it turns out.

Men's Fragrance Soap Part 2

This soap was a first for two reasons. For starters, it was my first attempt to do a swirl with more than two colors. Secondly, this was my first cold process/oven process batch I tested after
watching this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reybr2sdJ9Q&feature=related and reading about another bloggers experience here: http://soapmakingonabudget.blogspot.com/2008/11/cold-process-oven-process-cpop.html.
When you combine blogs with youtube videos you really have a resource based on the real world.

The fragrance of this soap is Drakkar Noir type. It came out pretty well but the fragrance was diminished by the 170 degreee heat of the cold process/oven process method. I may try lower temperatures for longer times next time. More on this process later.

Men's Fragrance Soap Part 1

In this 3 part series we will be talking about an exciting area of soaps I have found myself in. The seldomly explored realm of soaps made with men's fragrance. This is Cool Water inspires scented soap colored with titanium dioxide and ultramarine blue. The fragrance is practically and EXACT duplicate of the original and makes you hands and/or body smell great. Let us not forget the dual action of cocoa butter and shea butter. I have some of these for sale at my Esty store at http://www.etsy.com/view_listing.php?listing_id=21627396.

Caffienated Exfoliation

Here it is! My official first try at coffee soap. It has cured after 4 weeks and not a moment too soon! This wonderfull soap is made up from palm kernel,palm as well as moisturizing and conditioning oils such as canola and safflower. Cocoa butter not only hardens the soap but is soothing and hydrating to the skin. But that is not even the best part! The best part is I replaces 3 ounces of the lye water with fresh brewed coffee!! Then I added 1 ounce of fresh coffee fragrance oil to give the odor a boost and real coffee grounds as an exfoliant. I was skeptical to coffee being exfolient but when I tried in the shower, I was hooked! It removed all the dead skin from winter dryness and made me feel like I had baby skin! I bought a long shower brush so I can rubberband this soap to it and finally fix the skin on my back so it will not itch! The odor is not overpowering but subtly sweet and uplifting.

Rebatch soap.

Once a technique I thought should only be used for laundry soaps, rebatching has captured my interest once again. After 2 years of soap making trial and error, my skills are now able to produce soaps of presentable quality. I found scraps of various soaps, some which are literally 2 years old. After reading the post on this website:http://soapnuts.com/indexrebatch.html, I got some new inspiration. I took some of there advice about adding the liquid and leaving the damp soap sit overnight in a closed vessel. Where I used my own ingenuity was instead of hydrating with milk or water, I made a 25-30% glycerol solution in distilled water and heated the liquid in the microwave to 165-170 Fahrenheit. The hot liquid was drizzled on the soap shavings, and thoroughly mixed only to produce damp soap without puddles of liquid. I matted the mooshy mix into the pot and covered overnight. Then I put the soap in the crock on low. It can take 1 to 3 hours to melt and an additional 1 to 2 hours to dry out enough to mold. It should look simular to hot process soap when it is ready to mold. For this reason, I highly recomment the novice to get plenty of both cold process and hot process soap making experience before attempting rebatching. Besides, you will need alot of scraps to work from. Of coarse now that I have a working system I make soap fragrance and color free specifically for rebatching.

Failure is an opportunity for learning and perfection

This is an example of the true beauty of the soap making craft comes to head. Nothing need to be wasted! Any soap, or for that mattter, soap-like material you make has a use! Even if it is lye-heavy it can be the beginings of a non-petrochemical based general cleaner. A lye heavy soap can be grated or processed to a powder and mixed with other alkaline materials to make driveway cleaner, metal degreaser, or oven cleaning mixture! Another option is rebatching. You take a soap that is ugly, or that otherwise is mild and grate it and mix with a moisturizing liquid so it may be melted in a crock pot. More on this later. The picture you see above is a Rosemary/peppermint shea butter soap I made on February 15th. As you can see the milkway mold was destroyed while trying to release the captive soap. I have started to use this soap yesterday in the shower and it is WONDERFULL!! It just looks like crap. So, in essence, what I intend to do is make a special loaf of unscented/uncolored soap for rebatching and mix some with this and add necessary colors/scents to get a full loaf of rebatch. Grating this 1 pound 9 ounce calamity will be a chore IN ADDITION to the 1 pound 7 ounces of special rebatch soap I will need to make a 3 pound loaf

of rebatched rosemary, peppermint soap. I need a food processor soon!

The point of this post is show how anything coming from the soapers pot is usefull!

Hot Process soap

When in a hurry for some natural quality hand made soap, hot process is the way to go. While cold process can take up to a month to cure, hot process soap is ready as soon as it solidifies and cools to room temperature. Although some soapers use a double boiler as a method to heat the traced soap mix, I prefer a crock pot on LOW setting. The soap initially expands as the saponifacion completes. This rising is easily controls buy gentle stirring. Afterwords, the soap gets somewhat translucent as it enters the "gel phase" this is when the saponification is complete and the pH has dropped to 9 or 9.5. For the novice it is tempting to take out the soap , add fragrance and color, and put into the molds. But there is one more stage that the soap needs to go through. The last stage is a dehydration stage where the soap thickens somewhat to a mashed-potato consistency. This stage ensures that you get a hard soap that does not require more than a week to dry out. Here is a delicious Sandalwood/vanilla soap that I made on February 8th. I have some bars left and you can find them at http://www.indysoapmaker.etsy.com. They

are listed as "Calming Lather".

Cold and Hot Process soap

As you can see here, I am into making soap from my kitchen. My favorite is the cold process which is what you see here to my left. It is a loaf of what I call "Saturday morning soap". I call it this because when I was young my father would make cinnamon rolls for breakfast and I always loved these with a tall glass of orange juice. This is a shea butter soap with orange,cinnamon, and a hint of vanilla. The color is yellow iron oxide which is a natural mineral pigment. I will be adding more soap and pictures soon. I will be offering my soap for sale also.