It's aliiiiiive! And soaping.

Yes, I haven’t been using this blog like I should have been… But there is a new hobby to add in to the mix! Soaping!

I’m participating in the Alternative Liquid Swap for this year over at Soap MakingForum. So far it’s been a lot of fun, and it’s barely started! For my soap, I’m using ginger ale as my water-alternative. I’m scenting it with Nature’s GardenCandle’s Ginger Lime fragrance oil. This soap has about 5% vanillin content, so it’s going to really get dark. In order to preserve my fancy swirls, I’m going to let the FO darken the main portion of the soap, and then use vanilla stabilizer in the colored portion to (hopefully) ward off any color bleeding from the FO.

Now, my original plan had been to have the colored swirls be green and purple. I had even mixed up some ultramarine and chromium oxide for this purpose:

However, when I added the lye to the frozen ginger ale, it ended up looking like this: 

I probably could have gotten okay greens and purples if I had added a bunch more titanium dioxide, but I decided not to fight it.

Here’s the fragrance oil, and the vanilla stabilizer mixed with my oil-soluble TD.

And here are my prepped molds! My first time using ABS pipes as molds. I’m testing out two ways of dealing with the bottom, to see which I like better for keeping the soap from sticking to the flex lids. One has saran wrap, the other has a round of freezer paper over the edge of the pipe. On both of them I rubbed the inside of the pipe with mineral oil before adding more freezer paper to line it, just as an extra bit of insurance when I try to take the finished soap out.

Here’s the raw, uncolored soap batter. Not as bad as I thought! (And sorry for how dark it is—it was getting late and the main light in the kitchen is no good for getting true colors.) And boy, this is a huuuuge batch. Biggest one I’ve ever made. I used 2kg of oils for it, which is the amount I used for my masterbatches! I was so worried that it would come spraying out when I used my stickblender.

So then I portioned off about a third of it (weighing, to make sure I got close!) and added the stabilizer and TD. I forgot to take another picture after I split half of THAT off and mixed in some yellow mica!

And so I mixed the Ginger Lime oil into the main batch (which didn’t really change the look of it), and then did an In the Pot Swirl with the colors. With two molds, I really wanted to make sure the colors were evenly distributed, which is why I chose to do an ITP swirl. So pretty!

After that I very carefully poured the soap into my molds… It just barely fit! Whoo! And then I used a bamboo skewer and did a quick spiral swirl just to up the complexity of the look. lol 

After that it was a quick spritz with alcohol, cleaning up the spilled batter, covering the top with a plastic Ziploc bag, then wrapping the whole thing in towels to try to get it to gel. I’m not sure if it will gel or not. On the one hand, there’s plenty of sugar in the ginger ale and plenty of mass to generate heat as the saponification reactions occur. On the other hand, I soaped low. The oils were about 92F, and the lye-ginger ale was even lower, about 64F. That’s pretty darn chilly for soaping. We’ll see!