First Two Batches of Soap

When there’s something I want to try and learn how to do, I first obtain the supplies and tools, then sit on them for a month or two while procrastinating and watching a tutorial here and there, until I’m at last ready to go for it and do it. That’s what happened with my soapmaking adventure. It takes me even longer to decide to finally post about it and in this case I had to make a second batch of soap just to snap a picture of all the soap bars fresh out of the mold, which I failed to do the first time around. I did take a picture of soap sitting in the mold as it was poured, and the date in the filename tells me that it happened over two months ago, on April 5th of ’22.

I made a mistake that every beginner very likely makes: mixing lye-water and oil mixture for just a bit too long, so that it got too thick and had to be spooned into the mold, which yielded holes inside soap bars. I used soap calculator at http://soapcalc.net/calc/SoapCalcWP.asp to create the recipe. It looked like this:

Other than the overmixing mistake, this soap turned out great. I used lilac fragrance oil from Brambleberry (I got all the oils from them too), but only half the weight prescribed in recipe and it still provided plenty of scent that is still present in the soap after two months of curing. I used a green mica powder to give it some color. By the time we began using this soap, I have made a round soap dish, based on an image of a rosetta of some unknown cathedral. I modeled all of the details, however when slicing the model in Cura I realized that the smallest level of detail will not even print for the most part, so I took it out and instead used an accent color in Silk Rose PLA to give it some visual interest.

The model for this 3D print is available on Thingiverse with printing info. I would like to print soap molds with TPU filament, but that might involve some trial and error, because the roll of TPU I have has given me unsatisfactory results with printing of cone molds – the layers would be delaminated in spots, making the mold leaky and unusable.

The second batch of soap was made two nights ago, and this time it’s blue with animalistic instinct fragrance oil from Nature’s Garden. I used the same recipe as the first batch. I went for another small batch so that I can get a batter hang of it before I feel confident and go for a 42oz loaf of soap.

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