Botched Batches

So last January, I made a batch of soap and it came out so silky smooth!  The Hubby and I have been loving using it in our showers and smelling so sweet.  The ingredients I used are coconut oil, palm oil, soybean oil, olive oil, and beeswax.  Doesn't that sound amazing?  And it smelled lovely, like oatmeal and honey.

Did you know that Glycerin (made naturally during the soap-making process) is worth more than a bar of soap?  So the large soap makers take the natural glycerin out of their soap, sell it, and then sell you a bar of soap without it! They make out like bandits, selling two products from one process.  When you make your own home-made soap you keep all that glycerin to help smooth and moisturize your skin.

If you take the 20-30 minutes to make your own soap, you will have enough for about 6 months, you will smell great, and your skin will feel SO soft.  This generally costs us somewhere around 3 dollars a bar of soap. Which seems like a lot if you are comparing it to something you buy at Target, but the quality is closer to a luxurious bar from France which would run you anywhere around 6-12 dollars a bar.

A picture from my last successful batch

But unfortunately, this post is not about what a wonderful soap-maker I am.  It is about the virtue of patience and how I don't have it.

We were down to the last few bars of soap so I bought all the ingredients I needed, suited-up and started my cold-process soap. I began by carefully measuring my oils and heating them up.  While they were getting to temperature I started to prepare my lye.  Lye makes me nervous.  It is one of the most caustic materials on the planet and you need to treat it carefully.  Unfortunately, when I get nervous, I get stupid.

For example, I know that the oils has to be around 120-140 degrees when you add the lye.  And even though I have a thermometer clearly telling me it is 180 degrees,  I still added the lye so I could be done with it.  It immediately started to get stiff, almost seizing, so I poured it into my molds.

I pulled out my vinegar to clean my work site and when I returned to my soap it looked like a throbbing volcano.  It was growing and bursting in the middle.  I was actually worried that it was going to grow and expand right out of the molds and onto my table, which would not of been good because it takes a few hours for all the lye to be converted to soap.  At least it didn't look like this.  What a mess!

This is after it had cooled down and my little volcano collapsed

So I tossed my whole batch and will try again next weekend.