Three Part Post: Soaping Update, Store News, New Project

Ok, here’s the deal. I’m new to soaping and that coupled with my enthusiasm for trying new things may have gotten me in over my head here. It’s ok because life is all about learning. Now on to the pictures of what went wrong.

My first batch of soap seemed to go so well with the assemblage but when it came to cutting it things got a little crumbly. The first layer filmed too much to adhear to the second layer and really showed off in a painful way when it cracked.

On to batch two. It was also a test to try out something I read on a blog somewhere about pushing the top layer around to make it look like whip cream. I mastered that Ok but the assembly overall it wasn’t as smooth going with all the ingredients I added that seemed to firm the soap faster. It did look good once it was set up and I did manage to make some little travel soaps that are now available in my store out of the left over soap. However, cutting the soap here again was a problem. I was using a large kitchen knife since it’s what I have at the moment but it was cracking the layers apart. I decided to test out cutting really large bars and that worked out much better for this batch. The vanilla orange combination I’m really loving along with the monster size bars that will last forever. Eventually, they will also be available in my store.

The last two weeks I’ve really focused on the look of my stores and I’m happy to say it is coming along well. New inventory has been slowly trickling into my store so be sure to check it out.

Tonight I was very excited to have a package in the mail with Agar Agar powder for making jelly soaps and citric acid for making bath bombs. Of course I had to try out at least one tonight so I reviewed my stash of recipes and found I was missing an ingredient for the bath bombs so jelly soaps it was.

The process has to be carried out really quickly because the Agar Agar firms up extremely fast so I didn’t really get any “in progress” photos but here are a few (ahem) from the two batches I made tonight.

The green soap just isn’t jelly enough for what I’d like and the second one has even more Agar Agar so likely it won’t be what I want but testing will have to come later after I get some sleep. My typing errors have-sky rocketed in the last 30min so I will say goodnight before something really weird shows up here.