English
Hi this is Teri from Tree Marie Soapworks. Today I'm going to be showing you how to
make this soap. It ended up being a marbling technique. I'm going to show you
how I did that. Let's get started.
First I'm adding an ice cube that's frozen distilled water and then, next, I add the
rest of my water, just cold distilled water. I'm using sugar in my
water at a rate of one teaspoon per pound of oils to help my batters stay
fluid longer. I add this to my distilled water and I dissolve it completely
before I add my lye. Next, I'm measuring my sodium hydroxide and then my sodium lactate
and then I add my sodium hydroxide to my distilled water and then
I set this mixture aside. It warms up and I set it aside under my vent fan on my
stove to let it cool. Then I will add my sodium lactate when it's cooled.
Now,I'm measuring my hard oils. The first is coconut oil and then lard after I
measure these I microwave them until they're melted. Next I measure my liquid
oils. First I have avocado oil and then castor oil and then next I have olive
oil. I have a little squeeze bottle of each of these, so I use that at the
end so I don't go over because sometimes I go over if I'm measuring them all in
one container. That just prevents me from putting an extra in having to try
to get it out.
Then next I measure my peppermint oil essential oil and then that was pink grapefruit. It was
just a fragrance not an essential oil because pink grapefruit essential oil
doesn't really hold up in cold process soap. So I wanted to try that combination
for cold process soap so I decided to use a fragrance... You saw that I used
Molten Lava and Neon Pigment for the colorant and then I'm mixing it with a
palette knife on a sheet of Plexiglas. I added a little olive oil to my
colorant to mix it. That olive oil is just adding onto my super fat and I only
add just as much as I have to to get the mixture wet and to be able to mix it
up well. This colorant is a little strong on its own so I like to tone it down
with a little bit of red oxide. I'm using red oxide at a rate of a quarter of a
teaspoon per pound of oils.
Next, we have smooth coconut carbon and it's also called activated charcoal.
All of these colorants I got from ElementsBathanBody.com
Really with the coconut carbon, you don't need to mix it this way; it's just what I prefer to do.
Coconut carbon actually mixes it really well if you just add it to your
mixture. It's a little powdery though so you have to be careful that it
doesn't go everywhere. Now that our colorants are prepared, let's prepare
our squeeze bottles. Notice that I cut the tops off of the squeeze bottles a
little bit, probably just a eighth of an inch or so, just to get a little more out
at a time. These liners are just the sealed air packaging that you get in
your shipments and I cut the top off of them and I'm just putting them into the
squeeze bottles. I got this tip from the Soap Challenge Club from somebody there,
and I just found it really helpful. Now our hard oils are melted and it's
time to add the liquid oils.
Then I add the fragrance. This fragrance combination is known not to
speed up, so I probably wouldn't have added this yet unless I knew it was
going to behave for me. Okay my temperatures are between 85 and 95 and
I strained my lye mixture into my oils.
Next, I will weigh the bowl and the contents and then I will subtract off
the weight of the bowl and then divide that number by two you totally don't
have to do this step. You can just eyeball it when you're splitting the
batch in half. Okay now it's time to just stick blend the mixture until emulsion
is reached. That's just when it's not going to separate it anymore.
Next, I'm just splitting my batter in half with that number that I calculated
before.
Okay, now that the batter is divided in half we just add the colorants, and I add
a little at a time of the red, just because I don't want it to go too dark.
Normally I add the sodium lactate after the lye solution has cooled but before I
add it to the oils but I forgot, so no big deal, I just added half of it to each
of these containers. If you don't know sodium lactate is a natural hardener and
it makes the soap last longer, it makes it release easier from the molds,
so that's why I use it. After everything's mixed in I just add as much as I can to
the squeeze bottles.
Next, I get the mold ready and I elevate the left side so that the soap doesn't
spread out too quickly.
I decided that it was easier to pour on the far side of the mold and let it come
toward me so I have that side as the low side and then the side toward me as the
elevated side.
As the batter started to reach the other end
I took the blocks out and I turned the mold around and propped up that side
and I worked from that end.
I wanted these waves of color to be a little irregular and not just stripes
so I started pouring in one corner of the mold
I was trying to get a little more waves in the soap and I got the Lazy Susan out,
but it just didn't work and it really only changed the batter about an inch
and a half in from the edge, so I decided to do a back and forth swirl and then
just marble the rest. I really love this glass stirring rod it works so nicely to
swirl and it doesn't want to jump across the bottom like the wood skewers
do. It just glides across the bottom. When I am done with this soap, I put it
through a gel by covering it up and I put it on a heating pad, and I set it for
medium or high my ambient temperature is around 72 degrees Fahrenheit. In this
case I left the heating pad on for around an hour, because there's so much
surface area in a slab mold that it escapes more easily, so that's why I kept
it on a little longer than I do with my loaf molds. Once that hour is finished I
just keep it covered up and I don't let it expose to any air for 48 hours
usually at least, and sometimes I just try and forget about it for a little
while because it seems like I always regret it if I take it out of the mold
too early, so I like to leave it covered up and go on to another project and then
in a few days I take it out and unmold it. And you can see this got soda ash on it
and I have that problem a lot when I'm using slabs. So I did a little research
so we're gonna jump into the what I learned section. For the soda ash I
looked on Saponification Nation to see what I could find about that with slab
molds and I found out that if you reduce your water it should be less of a problem,
which I already reduced my water quite a bit. I use 25 percent 'water as a
percentage of oils' and I'm probably going to lower that to about 22 or 20.
Also I found out that low ambient temperature can cause that and also even
a draft because some of this soda ash even happened when I took it out of the
mold and it just had it I was trying to dry it quickly so I could do this video so
I had a fan on it, and I had it in front of the dehumidifier, so I think having
too much of a draft can also cause soda ash. Also you want your trace to be
as thick as possible, which I think it was about as thick as I wanted it for
this, but also try to cover it up as quickly as possible after you're
finished. You don't want is exposed to air if you don't have to. So... by reducing
my water and increasing my ambient temperature and covering it and just
having higher temperatures of soap in general, like I usually soap between 85
and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, know I might bump it up a little bit and see how that
works on my slab molds. Because I really like the designs, and I want to do more
slab molds, but if I keep having trouble with soda ash it's just not worth it.
If you're watching the video here, I used a steamer to try to see if it would take
off the soda ash and it didn't do a very good job, so I had to let it dry and then
just plane it off like I planed off the other ones. For those of you who aren't
familiar with soda ash it's just that white film that appears on the top and
it's kind of a crystalline structure but it is chemically soap, so it's nothing to
worry about. It's not harmful, but it's just kind of a undesirable appearance
and as soap makers we just try to get rid of it.
I also learned that that I like pouring the soap into the slab mold on the far
side and elevating the opposite side instead of elevating the left side, because I'm
right-handed it makes it hard to pour on the right wall I think it would be
easier to pour either on the far end or even on the left side and elevating the
right side so it's something that I'm going to think about next time I use the tall and
skinny mold. I also learned that I didn't really like using the Lazy Susan and it
might have just been because I was swirling it back and forth instead of
doing the really fast motion of turning it one way and then stopping quickly. It
just seemed like it was actually better to do it on the table. And when using
that spinning design and swirling and then stopping really quickly I think
that most of the design happens about an inch and a half in from the edge of the
mold so I have to think about a different design to accentuate that and
I think I might try doing rays out from the center next time. One more thing I
remembered when I was making this soap, and I already knew this but it was
refreshed for me, is that when you use ice cubes in your lye water it also
minimizes the fumes. When you get those fumes it's not as bad when you use ice
in your lye water so that's just one thing you might want to consider.
For all of you who are soap makers I am guest teaching in Amy Warden's
Soap Challenge in the month of July. So if you would like to get my instruction on
the technique called pointy layers you can sign up for her email list so you don't
miss it. You don't have to participate in the challenge,
you can just receive the tutorial and vote on the winners if you want to.
But if you do participate, it's really a neat thing because you get comments from
people all around the world and it's just so encouraging, and you get to talk
to soap makers all around the world and it's a wonderful experience, and also
Amy has a Facebook group that's good for answering questions so during the
challenge you can go on there and see what people are talking about and Amy
answers questions,and you get tips and tricks from there and I've just learned
so much from there. If you like these videos and
you would like to see more like this you can subscribe and hit the bell for
notifications and thank you so much for watching! :)