English by Teri
Hi, this is Teri with Tree Marie Soapworks. Today I'm going to be showing you
how to make this bar. It's a Taiwan Circling Swirl technique and there's
five partitions, and this is also a palm-free recipe. Stay tuned to the end of the
video and I will give you some tips. And today I'm going to give quite a few tips
on how I get my bars to look so smooth. Let's get started. First I added about a
third of my waterway in distilled water ice cubes, to help it cool down faster
and then I added the rest of my water weight in just cold distilled water. Next,
I measure my sodium hydroxide and add that to my water, and I stir that. And you've
got to make sure you stir it right away so it doesn't settle to the bottom and
get it all clumpy because then it's hard to get broken up. After that I measure my
sodium lactate, and this is just for making the bar a little harder and it
releases from the mold a little easier, so I use one teaspoon per pound of oils
for this. And I set it aside with my cooling lye water and I just do that so
I don't forget to use it. If you're new to soap making there's an order that I
usually follow when I'm making my recipes. I usually start with the lye
water, and get that cooling. Then next, I melt my hard oils, and then while I'm
melting my hard oils, I will measure my liquid oils into a pitcher. And I start
with my avocado oil, or something that I used less of and it's a pretty liquidy.
So if I go over, I can take that back out And then, I go to my castor oil, which is
thicker, and that is usually easier not to go over. And you notice I use my
little bottles to top it off, because if I have that mixture of those oils, I
can't really take it back out, because they're all mixed together. So I do my
olive oil last, and I try not to go over by stopping short; and then using my
little squeeze bottle to top it off with the weight that I need. Next, I measure my
fragrance and this is Cranberry Salsa from Rustic Escentuals and it is
wonderful! Okay, now that my coconut oil is melted, I add my cocoa butte,r and I
stir that until it's melted or I just microwave it until it just barely melted.
When tempering chocolate to get that shine, there's a way they do it, and the
magical temperature they uses 93 degrees Fahrenheit. Also chocolate gets that
film on it. To me it looks like soda ash, but they call it bloom. It gets a "fat
bloom" which is cocoa butter. And so when I'm dealing with cocoa butter I like to
keep it around 93 degrees or a little above or a little below, but I don't like
to get it too warm or too cold. So that's why I just try to stir it in to melt it,
and then if I need to I'll microwave it at the end, but I don't microwave it any
more than I have to. I just want to thank Johanna from Mad Mica's for sending me
some gorgeous mica's. I'm using five of them here and I'm using all of these at
1.5 teaspoons per pound of oils and the first one is Snow White
Mica, and then the next one is a gorgeous one. It's Harold's Purple Crayon. This is
my preferred way of mixing colorants. Now, with micas you don't really need to use
this way. They mix in pretty well. With oxides, ultramarines, and neons this is a
great way to get out all those clumps, but micas don't usually have problems
mixing in. The next color I'm using today is Lettuce Entertain You, and green is my
favorite color so I am always looking for good greens.
The next color I'm using today is Pumpkin Head and it very much looks like
the color of a pumpkin when it comes out. It's not nearly as red as it looks here.
So if you're looking for a good pumpkin orange try this one.
And for some reason for the last color my video cut out and that was the black
color, and it was called Wicked. Okay, now that the lye has cooled, I add my sodium
lactate and then I strain it into my oils.
Next, I weigh my bowl and the contents. And then I subtract the weight of the
bowl off and I divide that number by 5 to get my 5 equal amounts that I need
for splitting my batch. After I have all the calculations done, I stick blend
until an emulsion is reached.
(It looks like I'm banging my stick blender on my glass bowl and I'm really
not, it just looks like it from this view.)
Ok, next, I just used that number that I calculated before and I split my batter
five ways.
Next, I just add my colors and I stir them in until they're completely
incorporated. For this batch I'm using 6% fragrance and then I took that number
and I divided it by five.
If you don't have your own dividers, I just made these and I made a video
showing how I did it, so if you're interested, I will put a link to that
video at the end of this video.
I'm just using this skewer to loosen up the batter and make sure it's flowing
smoothly for when I swirl it.
I'm using popsicle sticks to swirl this and I think maybe I should have made my
lines a little closer together.
When I'm finished with this I cover it, and I preheat the oven to the lowest
temperature. For my oven it's 170 degrees Fahrenheit. And I set this in the oven
and I turn OFF the oven, and I turn on the oven light and the heat from the
oven light makes it go through gel. And I just keep it in the oven all night with
the light on and then in the morning I turn off the light and let it come to
room temperature naturally in the oven. And then I usually wait another day to
cut it. When I use this 10-inch mold and I make bars that I have to cut
horizontally, I have been just making nine bars instead of 10, so I'll cut one
bar off the end and then I'll cut it into eight more bars horizontally. The
reason I do this is because otherwise they would just be 2 inches tall, and to me
the proportions look a little short and so that's why I ended up you and making
them about a little more than 2 and 1/8. And then I'll have that last bar at the
end. And now, as promised, I'm going to tell you a little bit about how I make
my bars look so smooth and I'm not gonna have time for all the tips that I wrote down so I will have to continue this next time. I'm going to start with the
very beginning of your batch when you're formulating your recipe. When you put
your recipe into soapcalc.net, the default for your water is 38% of "water as a
percentage of your oil weight" that is a lot of water, and that causes sometimes
glycerin rivers, but sometimes I think it's just kind of a grainer looking
soap, so I drop my "water as a percentage of oil weight" down to 25%. Normally like
in most of these videos I use 25%. I've gone down to 20, And 20 percent is good
if your fragrance doesn't accelerate and stuff like that or you're very
comfortable with your batch but normally I just use 25%. The next thing I, do for
makings smooth bar is I use sodium lactate sodium. Lactate is a natural
ingredient. It's just from fermented beets or corn and it's a salt, a liquid
salt, and it just makes the bar harder it makes it last longer.
But the reason why I use it is it makes the soap release from the mold a lot
easier, and therefore you get a smoother bar. You know what happens when the soap
sticks to the side. Your bar, your side of your bar, is all messed up, so that would
be my next tip, is just using sodium lactate at a rate of one teaspoon per
pound of oils.
The next tip I have for you is to soap at temperatures between 85 and 95
degrees Fahrenheit. I used to soap out 120 and that just
caused a lot of acceleration. And then I started soaking at room temperature, and
the problem was soaping at room temperature was, some of my heart oils
got hard and they caused stearic spots in the final bar. Those are those little
white spots you see. I mean sometimes white spots can be from air bubbles, but
sometimes they are from your hard olis starting to harden before the other oils.
And to stop that from happening, I just have been using 85 to 95 degrees to make
my soap, and it seems like it's working just fine, and I don't get those stearic
spots throughout my soap. I will continue these tips in the next video I have
quite a few more. And also if you have any questions, please just ask them in
the comments and I will try to address them by responding to you or address
them in a video. And thank you to you who have checked out my website and made a
purchase I really appreciate it. And thank you for watching today! And please
like this video if you found it helpful, and subscribe and hit the bell for
notifications, and I will see you next time!
Have a great day! :)