Masterbatching Lye For Future Soaping

Masterbatching Lye For Future Soaping

I saw a great video by Cathy Mcginnis who teaches Soaping 101 on YouTube. She also has a great Facebook group called Soaping 101 Study Hall, which I love. Anyway, I came across this video while doing research on soaping and decided to give it a try.

Here's the video in question:

I'm really excited to give this a go because one of the most difficult parts about soaping for me is being patient and waiting for my lye water to cool to room temperature. Because I don't use ice in conjunction with my distilled water, this can take up to 1 1/2 hours.

I went to Good Will and found a great container that I'm going to use specifically for lye water. It has a neat pour spout for future pouring and is a good size to create just enough to soap with for a couple of months. I weighted my lye and found that I had 17.64 oz. So, I measured out 17.64 oz of water and poured the lye in. Now it's sitting out in my garage cooling overnight to get to room temperature.

I'm debating whether or not to masterbatch my oils too. I'll have to think about that more before making that commitment. Until then, I'm lye watered up and ready to soap!!!

New Order With Nurture Soaps

New Order With Nurture Soaps

It's finally back in stock so I placed my order!!!! Really RED mica!

I am pretty excited because it's the only true red that I've seen in CP soap. I've gotten close with red raspberry mica, but not as close as this one. I also ended up getting a few more things: activated black charcoal and spring green mica.

I intend to use the green to make some Christmas soaps, but the red and black I'm going to be using in my next Great Cakes Soapworks challenge. I just hope my order gets here in time to make a soap for it. 

Oatmeal Bath Bombs

Oatmeal Bath Bombs

We just got back from our vacation to the Northwoods of Wisconsin and boy, do I feel relaxed! I brought some bath bombs along with us to give to our nieces who are 9 and 6. I thought it would be fun for them to have some bath-time fun while we were on our vacation together. I was right! They LOVED them!

So...this fueled my inner fire to try a new recipe. I ended up buying a book from Amazon.com called Make It Fizz by Holly Port. If you haven't picked this up yet, I HIGHLY suggest you get it - it's AMAZING! The first recipe I decided to try was one with ground oatmeal which she calls "colloidal". I got out my Vitamix and some old fashioned oats I had sitting in the pantry. I threw in a bunch and pulverized them into a fine powder. I poured it into a ziplock bag and labeled it for future projects.

I made some of these 1 : 1 ratio embeds yesterday. When I say 1 : 1 - I mean that it's equal parts baking soda and citric acid. This causes intense fizzing action in bombs and will help to move the bomb around the tub to give the bomb some movement.

I am using some bath bomb colors I got from a Facebook group I'm a part of called Soap Scents by Amy. These are glitter bath bomb colors so I'm really excited to see the colors once I get them in the tub.

One thing I learned from this book which made my life so much easier is that I can use my KitchenAid to mix up my bomb mixture. Wow! Never thought of this before - I always tried using gloved hands which took FOREVER! So, I gathered my dry ingredients and put them into the KitchenAid, turned it on and let the machine do it's magic. Once it was mixed, I added the blue mica to create a nice robin egg blue color.

Then it was time to melt my butters. For this recipe it called for shea and mango butters along with some avocado oil. Then I added my fragrance, water and alcohol together and slowly poured them into my dry mixture.

Now it was time to turn up the power again and let the machine mix it up. I have to admit I was a little nervous about mixing it this way. So many things could potentially go wrong. The dry mixture could fly all over....the water and oil mixture could start the chemical reaction and begin fizzing the dry mixture...but this time? Nothing bad happened - just beautiful, perfect bath bomb mix!

Now it was time to put them together. I used a snowball maker, a round ornament and a heart shaped ornament. I found the smaller the mold, the easier it was to handle. These really turned out cute!!! I cannot wait to give these a try tonight in a relaxing bath before I head to bed.