I may have my first failed batch of soap. The shampoo bar is just not curing well and any time I try to cut it it’s soft and crumbly. I’m going to leave it a week and try again to see if that helps, but I’m not too optimistic right now. Ahh well. I’ll stick to what’s working: hard soaps.

Over the past two days I’ve made two batches of soap (I’m really pleased with being able to get them done despite Ken not being home). One was a German Chocolate Cake scented Coco Loco soap. The level of chocolate scent is just in.sane. I’ve got them cut and curing downstairs (they cut beautifully, so it’s going to be a nice hard bar) in the basement and it’s a good thing they’re down there because that scent is positively distracting! The bad part is that it’s sitting right next to the peppermint and the two combined are just… wow. I coloured this one a red-on-red swirl that I think looks really nice.

The picture makes it look more pink than it is, but still. Pretty!Last night I made another new batch, a Citrus & Teakwood scented Winter-Sun soap. I haven’t cut it yet but the scent holds nicely and it looks to be another winner. I’ve been trying out colouring and I may have goofed a bit last night and not mixed well enough (so the colour isn’t as good as it could be) but we’ll see once it’s cut later today.

I’ll be picking up some new packaging ideas this weekend – instead of paper/wrapped labels I’m going to go with printed sticky labels on the back of the wrapping. For colour I’ll be picking up some ribbon to wrap around each bar. We’ll see how they look, later.

The worst part of this is, still, waiting. I want to try the soaps NOW, not in a week or more! Especially that chocolate!

So that’s the soap part. Life is going ok. Ken’s been able to come home not too late and I’ve been feeling more productive and less depressed. I even made us bento for today (which is the first thing to go when I’m feeling energy-drained). I’ve got a lot of work to do, but aren’t feeling overwhelmed by it (except for the website programming *le sigh*). Anybody willing to trade soap for programming?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 9:01 am by Kelly and is filed under Cooking, Health, Soapmaking, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.