Let's go way backJuly 17, 2008I think before I go any further with current events, let's borrow Doctor Peabody's way back machine from the Rocky and Bullwinkle show of yesteryear, and take a look at some of my previous experiences with soap making. In the beginning I was constantly making one terrible mistake, that of not taking good notes. With my aging memory I find it difficult to match what few pictures I did take with the few notes I have. Believe me I do a much better job of note taking today. That may very well be my first lesson learned as a soaper. But as I think back, a few batches do stand out as significant. Early in November I made my first batch of soap. The recipe was Shea Butter Supreme, from Anne Watson's book Smart Soap Making. Not knowing what I was doing, I used Lavender FO and ultramarine blue colorant. It was a perfect batch. Anne has said several times that there is no such thing as a failure in soaping. Either your batch turns out the way you want it or you learned something. The lesson I learned here is that even I can make good soap if I follow instructions. For a long time after that I religiously used the techniques in her book. Batch after batch came out perfect. In fact I didn't have a failure until I made a fatal error. Near the end of November 2006 I made a batch of soap using the All Veggie #1 recipe from Anne's book. My big mistake was to use fractionated instead of regular coconut oil. The result was that I got extremely soft soap that took forever to cure. In fact it never did get hard enough to make me happy. Eventually I rolled it into balls and gave it to friends and family. It was pretty and smelled good, but was way too soft. Lesson learned: follow your recipe carefully.
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In December of 2007 I started making my own recipes. For the most part I was successfully thanks to soapcalc.com and a nice little program called soapmaker. At the time there were some lively discussions about putting food into soap. Since I love orange juice I decided to see what would happen if I subbed orange juice for the water in the Hazelnut oil recipe in Anne's book. The soap turned out great, at first. It was a deep orange and smelled like real orange juice. Later the smell morphed into something not quite unpleasant but definitely not orangey. I will never do that again. Lesson learned: Just because something tastes good does not mean it will play nice with lye
For over a year made many unmemorable batches of soap using recipes from books and the Internet. Most were successes. A few failed, mostly for reasons I never did figure out. Then in February of 2008 a group I belong to decided to hold a newbie swap. At this point I decided that if other people can make pretty soap I could too. So I signed up for the swap and started making layered soap. After a few attempts I came up with a recipe that I call cocoa1. It is as follows. 3 oz cocoa butter, 3 oz coconut oil, 6 oz olive oil, 2 oz caster oil, 2 oz palms kernel oil, 2.24 oz lye, and 5.54 oz water. Since I had never done layering before I just tried to judge by eye how much soap to put in each layer. As a result I never did get perfectly even layers. Lesson learned: Weigh or measure your soap when dividing it to color it for layers. This is on my list of things to explore in the future.
Later the same month I attempted to do three layers using the cocoa1 recipe, blue colorant and lavender FO. Again I tried to do it by eye. Guess I'm a slow learner. Anyway I didn't get layers at all, but instead got some lovely soaps that have been described as summer clouds or aliens from outer space. Lesson learned: A failure is not always a failure. The soap was perfect, smelled and looked good.