April Soap Challenge Club: Sweet Mother of Soap

So I've just finished up my soap for the Soap Challenge Club! Here it be:

I began this project several days ago and you can read about the first part of my soaping journey here. In that post I discuss the importance of lauric and myristic acid in soap making and how, really, you can't make soap without them. They give soap it's cleansing power. I also talk about my search for non-palm, non-coconut sources of those fatty acids, my discovery of Ghee and the foul smelling soap I made with it. Ghee has another short chain fatty acid called Butyric acid. The post is titled, Butryic Put The ASS In Acid, and while I encourage you to read it, that's really all you ever need know about butyric acid!

For the last couple weeks as I've been brainstorming about this rustic soap, I had this idea in my head that I would make soap the way my grandmother would have. As a girl she was a migrant cotton picker in central Texas, and I wanted something authentic. I only wanted to use resources that would have been available to her.

But then, reality check!

People probably smelled a lot more and cared a lot less 100 years ago. In fact, no one in their right mind during that time period would have wasted valuable cooking oils (let alone butter!) to make soap. All the vintage soap recipes I can find tend to say something along the lines of

"take yer drippins and mix 'em with strong potash in a good bucket til it looks right..."

I mean, what? And, no, I have no desire to be as authentic as all that, or to store up my drippins and make soap out of them. Additionally, I don't think anyone wants to buy soap made from my drippins... I suddenly realized how nice it was to have solid SAP values and olive oil pomace!

So I made a new plan! I was going to make soap. That looked rustic. With rustic packaging. And blog about it. And enter it into the challenge. And quit overthinking it.

Ok, So, I had some "Sweeties" soap that I made a while ago that got too hot and developed glycerin rivers and heat tunneling. My kids loved it because it was scented with Bramble Berry's Buttercream FO, but I stole some from their stash and chopped it up. I thought the glycerin rivers would add a nice visual texture to the soap and the jumbled light and dark pinks would also add some variety.

I also wanted there to be some lighter shades in the soap, so the first thing I did was line the bottom of my 10" silicone mold with slices of the Sweeties soap. I then poured a small batch of unscented soap batter over them and let it rest for a day before cutting it up into slices. Now I was sure I would have a nice variation of light pink, dark pink and white cubes in my soap.

Next I made a batch of hot process soap using these oils:

Beef Tallow
Coconut Oil
Rice Bran Oil
Grapeseed Oil
Avocado Oil
Walnut Oil

I soaped with my full water amount at a 5% superfat. I usually superfat at 8%, but I also added heavy cream and wanted to take that into account. With the heavy cream I used 50% of it in my lye water, and the other 50% I slowly drizzled into the cook after the applesauce stage.

I've noticed adding dairy in this way can help reluctant HP soap to finish up (because of the added heat I'm sure)... and when I say reluctant soap I mean soap that keeps separating. This is normal during HP and it is totally fine, but you have to keep stirring and stirring to convince your oils to blend. In the past I would keep opening the lid and stirring my little arm off over and over, but I've found that adding a heat booster at this point can solve that problem. It saves your arm, and it saves all that moisture from escaping.

To add extra conditioning, I had planned to put an egg yolk in this soap, as I did for my Ghee soap, but I forgot to set some of the warm oils aside to temper the yolk. I tried tempering it with just a small amount of batter, but no... cooked egg. I tried tempering it with just a small amount of batter that had cooled but no... cooked-ish egg. So, better safe than sorry, I gave up on the egg idea and sent my son into the yard for some aloe. I peeled the aloe and blended it with the sugar water I had prepared. These were both added after the cook.

I slowly added the Sweeties chunks a little bit at a time stirring them in as I went because I wanted them to melt at different rates and really produce a mottled hodgepodge appearance. Also, since the Sweeties chunks weren't warm, throwing in a whole bunch of cold soap chunks at one time would have caused that finished HP batter to lock up thereby adding a bunch of air bubbles and just be no fun.

Since the Sweeties smell like buttercream I had my son go through all my FO/EO's and pick something he thought would pair well with it. He chose a Grapefruit, Rosemary and Lime EO blend that we use for our Sugar Mama soaps, bath bombs and scrubs. So Sweeties plus Sugar Mama equals Sweet Mother of Soap!

I would never have thought to blend these two together but they smell great! The BB Buttercream can cause soap to turn brown, and I actually wanted the main batter to be a little darker (remember I wanted those whiter pieces to stand out!) So I added .55 oz of GR&L EO's and .20 oz of Buttercream FO to the soap batter.

I poured it into my mold and left it on the counter to cool before sticking it into my deep freeze for the night. The next morning I took it out. It was a really light color, but I knew the buttercream would help it turn more brown. I think next time I might add sugar to the lye and see if I can get a little bit more brown. I didn't want to add honey because that was just darker than I wanted to go with this. As the soap cured over the next few days it did brown up a bit more and I'm fairly happy with it.

As for packaging... let me tell you. I'd had some big plans for this soap! I knew what I was going to do. I was going to wrap it in wild grapevines! How cool is that. I could just picture it. It was going to be epic. I had visions of my gorgeous, rustic, blue ribbon, flippin awesome soap in its world changing revolutionary wild grapevine wrapped uber-rustic packaging. (cue music... *We Are the Champions my friend...*)

Can you see what's coming? Oh yeah, its easy to be insightful when I give all kinds of foreshadowing to my failure!

It so. did. not. work. I mean. Maybe it's because I was doing my packaging over Easter Weekend and all, but my soaps totally looked like they were wearing crowns of thorns. Even though they were wrapped in grapevines... with no thorns. It didn't matter, they just looked like they were auditioning for Mel Gibson's next great movie, The Passion of The Soap.

Sigh. Creativity is often a winding funny road. Anyway after that I started panicking. My brain was out of ideas. I was scouring Pinterest and the internet and mostly coming away with ideas of things NOT to do... I tried tulle, quilting squares, bandannas, torn silk, torn satin, denim, tulle and torn silk, tulle and denim... I thought of birch bark, but we don't have birches peeling right now... I thought of scrapbook paper, watercolor paper, butcher paper, freezer paper.... AGHHHHH.

Then, I found a flour sack.

They aren't actually sacks afterall, but rather a coarse cotton square with nice uneven lumpy edges. I liked it. It seemed like a softer rustic, the way my soap had a softer appearance. I wrapped it fairly simply, just making hospital corners. I had some raffia, some hemp, some cord, yarn and tulle (did I mention the tulle yet? It wanted to get used) but what I liked best was the dark leather cording.

I had thought I might have my husband cut some thin slices of small tree brances to make a label, but I found some wood labels for mason jars that looked nice too. I tied a simple knot in the back, hand drew in the Bell Jar Beauty logo, and called it a wrap.

So, my soap didn't turn out the way I thought it would AT ALL. It was so different from the initial plans I'd had when I started. But, I learned sooooo much. I mean I learned about lauric, myristic, and butyric acid for sure, but I also learned how to add an egg yolk and how NOT to add an egg yolk to soap, I learned how soap was made in the 1800's, I learned how grateful I am to not have to guess at how much lye to use, and I also started thinking differently about how to package soap. I've just been doing cigar bands, but man, holding that bar wrapped in that flour sack... it feels solid and legit!

If you've made it this far, thanks so much for reading! I look forward to many more soapy adventures.