A full ten inches

It snowed a bit yesterday. Just a bit. Ten inches in about ten hours.

Some folks say you should cut down the dead plants in your yard at the end of the growing season. I'd sure hate to miss out on the fantastic imagery it provides through the winter, though. It's fun to watch the birds pick at the remaining seed heads, although they weren't out much yesterday.

These photos were taken around noon, just a few hours after it started to snow. See the big round of wood? That's the piece we brought home in the back of our new car. Our intent, if you recall, was to make a table with it. It would be useful to have something next to the fire to hold drinks, plates, pokers, and such. We new the wood looked big in the forest, and in the shop after birthing it from the back of the car.

Well, here it is next to the fire-pit. As you can see, it's a bit large for the location and purpose. We're still working on plans for the big wheel of pine. Any ideas?

So, how do you spend a day in the house? I decided to re-batch my last soap attempt. The hemp oil soap I made was a gorgeous green to start, with a deep, nearly wheat-y scent. Well, the color lightened, and the grain smell became a fish smell.

On the pro side, this is the bubbliest soap, and the least slimy soap, I've made to date.

Rebatching essentially consists of slowly melting down a batch of soap, then adding fragrances, colors, or new oils to the batch. Some folks swear by it, and other folks will only rebatch as a matter of last resort. Results form a rebatch are not usually as pretty, nor as consistnet in texture throughout the bar. However, rebatching allows the use of fragrances and dyes that react badly to lye or high temperatures. Lavender buds, for instance, turn a slimy brown and lose their scent in the presence of lye. However, the buds can be added to a rebatch and will retain their lovely characteristics.

The first step in rebatching is grating the soap. I kept wanting to dip my fingers in--doesn't it look just like a great pile of Swiss cheese? This soap was my largest batch yet, weighing in at a hefty five pounds. That's a lot of grating...

I put the soap in the oven at 200F, along with about one cup of milk. I think I should have used more liquid. I couldn't find a precise measurement anywhere on the web, just the general directive to moisten the soap shreds lightly.

After about four hours (but this is only supposed to take about 2 hours?!), I needed the oven to cook dinner, so it sat on the counter for a about an hour.

I turned the oven up to 225F, and let it go for another two hours. I still didn't get the gel that should have occurred, but it was soft enough to scoop into molds. I added some tangerine and sweetgrass essential oils, plus some ground sage from the garden. The sage was supposed to add a bit of green, but instead it just made strange little green specks. At some point I might upgrade their description to artful specks, but for now they're just strange specks.

I'm tempted to rebatch the soap again, maybe using the boil in an oven bag method.

Not sure...

Here are the soaps from the silicon cupcake mold. The rest of the soap is still in the quart cream mold.

I think I'll go back to gazing at the snow. Much more restful!

PS If you use a food processor to grate your soap, clean the soap off the pieces before putting them into the dishwasher. Unless you like bubbles escaping and running across your kitchen floor?

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween everyone!

Today's been more tricksy than treatsy for me, but we all have those days, don't we?!

So far, the hive-cozy we built for the bee box fell completely apart and was rescued by the liberal application of duct tape.

My bee hive has wasps, and no evidence of a queen. There's little hope that the colony will survive the winter.

I can't take a decent shot of the last batch of soap I made, not even to save my life. Luckily, Mr. Boom stepped in so you can get a feel for the real-life gorgeous color of the hemp-oil soap. There are two batches on the drying board, one ivory one grass green. I hope this is visible on your monitor, since the difference is imperceptible on mine.


I think I might try building a light box to get some nice photos. But not today.

Definitely not today!

Sshhhh: Christmas soap

Ssshhhhh...

Don't tell a soul. I'm making Christmas presents! But you don't think I'm actually planning ahead, do you? I think you all know me a lot better than that by now!

Since soap, at least cold process soap, needs 4-6 weeks to cure, I'm actually a little bit behind on this project.

Some months ago, a kind soul posted to the local Freecycle group that she had purchased a bottle of hemp oil as a healthy additive to her diet, but couldn't stand the stuff. It was too expensive to just toss, she said, so she wondered if anyone had a use for it. Bingo!

Who cares if she spit in the open bottle, if it was left uncapped on the counter for a week, or if she had put a razor blade in it....I would put it in soap and nobody would have to worry about germs or blades!

Hemp oil is a gorgeous green color, and smells a bit nutty. I guess the nutty smell is apropos considering the source! I keed! I keed! It's also very expensive and prone to the bane of all soapmakers, dreaded orange spot.

That's a real term, people. Look it up!

Anywho, I used the handy-dandy soap calc website, and came up with the following recipe:

185 grams each of hemp and castor oil
740 grams each of coconut (76 deg) and olive oil
703 grams water
271 grams lye

I knew I wanted to make a five pound batch, and I knew I had 185 grams of hemp oil. So, while I kind of used the back door to create the recipe and ended up with odd numbers for measurements, I was able to use up the exact amount of oil I was given.

I hope the pretty green color (which shows up a lot better in person than in these photos) stays in the soap. I expect the color will fade some, however.

Green soap for Christmas. How cool will that be?!!

the oils

after the addition of lye

in the fancy shoebox molds

Whirlwinds

What a whirlwind weekend!

A new little niece was born, and is wrapped up in a blanket I crocheted. I can't believe it. Either part of it. The fact that A) this little miracle baby was born, and B) the fact that I managed to crochet a whole little blanket. I'll try to post a picture soon....

My city cousin and her boyfriend showed up on Saturday, so we had a big family dinner that night. Salmon, Chirp-chirp's awesome biscuits with some of the last herbs from the garden, a salad with some of the last tomatoes from the garden, and chocolate silk pie for dessert--a feast!

My cousin brought some very fancy milk over from a natural foods market, and we made two batches of mozzarella cheese. It's odd that they can get whole unpasteurized milk in the middle of the largest city in the northwest, but here on the rural side of the state I can't get it. Of course, I'd never pay $10 dollars for a gallon of milk, plus a bottle deposit, even if I could get it here, which is why I can't, I suppose. If there were enough consumers for milk at that price, it would be available. As it is, I'll just have to look back fondly on the weekend I made the BEST cheese ever, and made it twice in a row. The curds were firm, the cheese glossy and elastic, and we were in heaven. City boyfriend ventured out into the yard and picked the very last of the tomatoes, a few pea shoots, and minute bits of arugula and put together a caprese salad of sorts for dinner on Sunday. He also had me show him how to make homemade tortillas.
Oh, and soap.

He'd been dying to learn how to make soap ever since he heard that it was something I'd been trying my hand at (or, for the grammarians, at which I'd been trying my hand).

So, we made soap as well! I showed him the soapcalc website and gave him a list of oils I had on hand. Three hours later (0bsessed much, city boyfriend?) the recipe he put together consisted of castor, olive, and coconut oils. I'll post the whole recipe later if it turns out to be a keeper.

The boyfriend is definitely a keeper. If he doesn't propose to my cousin soon, I'm going to do it for him.

Celebrating one year

Today this humble little blog turns one year old.

After a seven month long gestation (starting in the spring when Bet sent me an e~mail saying we HAD to start a blog--to which my reply was "Heck No!") I logged onto Blogger and set up this little space.

Then I informed Bet we had a blog, and it's a boy. No, wait, we had a blog and here's the address.

That's better!

Splish Splash (by Kat)

Splish splash I'm loving the bath!

I couldn't wait any longer!!

I grabbed a bar of my homemade 100% olive oil castile soap and took a shower with it!

Can I just say wow?! I can't believe I made this stuff. I can't believe I'm sharing my shower with such an amazing bar of soap. Don't you have to be rich to have this kind of shower experience?

I guess not.

Did you know that commercial soap manufacturers, using a chemical process, remove the glycerin from their soaps, then sell the glycerin as a lotion?

It's kind of like the dairy industry.
The cream is removed from the milk product and then sold separately,
at a higher price of course.

When you make your own soap, the glycerin stays in, and the soap is just amazing.

Excuse me, I'm off to take another shower....

Guessing Game (by Kat)

Is this butter?

Is this cheese?


It's soap! Batch number three to precise.

75% Olive Oil
20% Coconut Oil
5% Castor Oil
Tangerine Essential Oil

Thirteen (big!) bars from this batch,
sixteen from the previous batch,
and eight from the re-batch of the first batch.

I think I've got next Christmas covered...

Rosemary Castille Soap (by Kat)

Alright, I've pretty much given up on my first batch of soap. The dendrochro-soap still site on my desk, but I'm ignoring it. I don't know, for instance, that the centers are still squishy, the outsides are crumbly, and that the bars lost their citrus fragrance and instead smell kinda like supermarket birthday cake frosting. I don't know none of that, ya' hear?

So, it was a leap of faith last night when I decided to do another batch of soap. I knew that my second batch would be a castile soap--I'm drawn to the simplicity of the recipe, the hardness of the soaps, and the gentle nature of the finished product. True Castile soap only comes from the Castile region in what is now Spain, and is made from 100% olive oil. Today, the term castile seems to apply to ANY soap with olive oil in it, no matter how small the percentage of the total fats the olive oil comprises. I've even heard Palm-Olive referred to as a castile soap, even though it's no longer manufactured with palm and olive oils, nor is it even a true soap any more, but rather a detergent.

Tangentville, there, eh? I'm still working on mu first cup of coffee...

My biggest concern about making a castile soap was the length of the cure--several weeks to a few months longer than typical soap recipes. But you know what? The time I spent worrying about that was time that the cure would take. Yeah. Duh. So, last night I jumped in.

This recipe, like the last, comes from Little House in the Suburbs. I cut the recipe in half, which can be iffy in the world of soap making, but I couldn't' bring myself to commit to such a large batch. Because soap relies on extremely careful measurement, a smaller batch will be more significantly effected by a miscalculation than a large batch will. I deal with this in my lab at work as well, and have page after page in my lab's procedural notebook describing remediation for this problem. We don't need that detail here, but just realize that bigger batches are safer and smaller batches are more fragile.

Instead of heating the fats on the stove, I simply stuck my large bowl of olive oil in the microwave. A few minutes was all it took to bring the temperature up to about 100 degrees F. I'm not going to tell you how much of the warm oil I spilled on the floor. And really, don't handle lye with an oily floor underfoot...

So, after mixing the warmed oil and lye (bringing to trace), adding a few drops of rosemary essential oil, and slipping around a bit on the floor (oh right, I'm not mentioning that), I poured the mess into my very fancy soap mold--a converse shoebox lined with plastic wrap! Wrapped up in towels for insulation, the baby soap slept in its cradle overnight on the kitchen counter...


...until I unceremoniously dumped it on its head this morning and sliced it up. I'm cruel before coffee.


And here they are--18 bars of olive oil rosemary soap. They smell so tasty, and I can't wait for them to grace my kitchen sink.

Best Smelling House Award (by Kat)

I win the "best smelling house award" today.

Oh true, the cat boxes need to be changed, the trash needs to be taken out, the compost has fruit flies....

But, I just made castille soap with rosemary essential oil. And then pulled two fresh loaves of bread out of the oven.

I'll post pics of the soap tomorrow, along with the recipe. I'm really antsy to see if this batch works, considering the state of the last effort.

It's hard to worry though, when the house smells this darn good!!!!

Oh Noes! The Dreaded Orange Spot! (by Kat)

Are you sick and tired of my soap woes yet?

Part of the "excitement" of soap making is the waiting. After you've combined your fats and lyes, fragrances and color, poured the slurry into the mold, unmolded and sliced your bars, you get to wait. And wait.

Four to six weeks later, you have a bar of "young" soap. Four to six months later, you have a bar of well-cured soap. For laundry purposes, just a few days cure may suffice, but if you want to use it on your body, the longer you wait the better your product will be.

I'm in the waiting stage on my first batch, kind of in a holding pattern, wondering if I should start a second batch before gauging the success of my first batch. I know I need to insulate the soap better so that I get a complete gel. I know that I should probably make sure the temperature of the lye and the fats are more similar before combining the two. I know these things because of problems that I see in the soap.

BUT, here's the frustration. I now have Dreaded Orange Spot. Yep, that's the official term! DOS is what the real soapmakers call it. DOS makes your soap project a POS!


Mistakes that I can learn from are okay, in a way. Problems that I can't learn from just make me angry. Grrrr.

On the positive side, 'cause I'm such sunny and upbeat person at all times, the DOS makes the soda ash seem like a very minor detail.


Seriously, though, I think I'm falling in love with soapmaking. Science meets kitchen meets something better for my family? How cool is that?!!

Quiet (by Kat)

It's been pretty quiet around here, hasn't it?

I've been up to my brows in reading the three soap making books available at our (tiny) library and devouring every web page I can find that pertains to the subject.
I'm not happy with what I'm finding...

One of the books from the library gives three very bad pieces of advice in the first three pages. So really, am I going to trust anything else she has to say on the subject? Heck no!

The second book was a real hoot to read. It was full of old soap advertisements, and delved very deeply into the history of soap making. I loved her style, and she had really good advice. The trouble is, the book was written in the early '70s. The methods and materials she uses are very out of date. I'm not going to stir my soap for an hour and a half when I can use a stick blender. It's just not gonna happen! Also, her book only has two recipes that don't include tallow.

At the time the book was published, tallow was extremely inexpensive, if not free. I haven't found a local supply of it that isn't nearly the same cost as hamburger. I think this is because the stores are owned by national franchises who just can't see past the end of their greedy little fingers and must set a minimum price for everything, even if it's just scraps that they'll end up throwing out anyway. So, that book was fun, but not so helpful.

The third book is very pretty and has lots of recipes for melt and pour soaps. I'm sorry, but taking a pre-made bar of soap, melting it down, and pouring it into a mold is not soap making! It's soap art. I'm not knocking soap art--I have two sisters-in-law who do that type of thing and their results are gorgeous and smell really nice--but it isn't "making" soap.

So, web pages. They've been somewhat helpful. I've spent a lot of time there. A LOT of time there. HOURS there. And you know what, it's frustrating as h e double hockey sticks.
I work closely with the EPA and our state's department of ecology. I can sling acronyms with the best of the government agents. But holy cow, soap makers put the g-men to shame when it comes to cryptic "communication."

I've been persevering though, reading page after page of in the soap makers' forum. Finally, I decided to register so I could post a few questions that I had not been able to find answers to. The registration process required entering a series of letters and numbers shown in one of those spam-bot prevention boxes. The program was case sensitive. Each letter was of a different font, and the letters themselves were topsy-turvy throughout the box. So how the h e double hockey sticks are we supposed to be able to tell the difference between a capital v and a lower case v?

Same thing with the w.

Same thing with the o.

I finally was given a box with no ambiguous letters, I entered the code, and it said the user name I chose was already taken. So, I changed my user name and tired to enter the code again. This time, the letter that stumped me was a straight vertical line. Was it an I or an l or a 1 or what? I guessed wrong, and then a message popped up saying that I had exceeded my number of tries.

No registration for me.

I went to bed.

Soap making is hard.
(My soap still isn't.)

So, while it's been quiet here on this blog, you can imagine that it hasn't been quite so quiet at home, here in front of my computer!

Stupid hockey sticks!!!

Feature or Bug? (by Kat)

In the world of IT, there's a question that pops up on occasion--is this a bug or a feature?

Is it supposed to do this? Did the designer think this was a good idea?

This question translates well into other areas of life, including soap-making. My soap has rings. My soap has tree rings. I'm labeling this, my first batch of soap, as the dendrochro-soap.

Bug or feature? I don't know.

I do know the rings are caused by non-insulated cooling on a not-so-warm kitchen counter. I don't know if it's bad, if it will fix itself on it's own like so many other problems are purported to, or if I'll need to re-mill the batch. The intensity of the scent decreased drastically, but I think it's still pleasant so I'm not too worried about that (bug or feature???).

All-in-all, I'm okay with this first attempt. I'm definitely going to do another batch in the near feature, but not until I get the kinks worked out of this batch.

Speaking of batches, I've got a batch of cakes in the oven as we speak (or at least as I type!). I'm using my brand new Chicago Metallic 8" cake pans to build myself a birthday cake. Smitten Kitchen has never ever never ever never ever failed me, so I'm trying yet another of her cakes, with absolutely no worries, to serve to the family tomorrow. The house smells so good....

Speaking of the house, it's so empty. We had family, including COUSINS!!! over for New Year's festivities. Giant snow forts, new games, lots of food, very late nights, and very sleepy mornings were the norm for the past few days. Now the house seems so empty. The Christmas decorations are down, the family is gone, the moon is waning, and Monday is nearly here. Bah.

But oh, the smell of that chocolate cake is something else....

First Soap (by Kat)

Well looky here! I did it!
I hereby present to you...

...my first attempt at soap.

It's still curing, but already it's "soapy,"
and the bars smell like yummy tangerines.

I'll post more pictures later, as well as a how-to,
but for now I must run back to the table.

We're learning another new game...
well they're learning it, and I need to catch up!

Hope you're all having a great new year's weekend!!!