where are your gloves and your helmet?

Made soap for the first time in years last night. It's currently bundled up in a nice warm insulated bag in my back hallway until it's safe for me to cut into bars- about 24 hours after pouring into the mold, which in this case is a half gallon milk carton. It'll have to cure after that. Hopefully I got the smell right; I was using orange, clove, and cinnamon essential oils, but inadvertently poured way more clove than I intended, and compensated by reducing the cinnamon a bit.

I now have very small amounts of multiple oils left, because the recipe called for slightly less of each oil than I got in each bottle/jar/packet, and a little more than half a jar of lye. I might have to make soap again if only to use the lye up. I don't want that stuff left sitting around.

I'll start shipping the shampoo out tomorrow. I've been testing it on my own hair for about a week now. It works pretty well and to me, at least, it smells nice. It seems to burn somewhat more than my regular bar shampoo when I get it in my eyes, though. If this proves to be the case for you and is a problem, but you still like the smell, I have also used it to wash my skin and it works well there, so it's not a total loss. I do suggest in advance that you use it first thing in the shower, as soon as your hair and the bar are both wet, and then put it somewhere out of the way of the water so that it doesn't get melty or squishy on you.

I will be making a batch of honey beeswax soap this week. Orange and cedar scent again, most likely. The beeswax I bought at Cambridge Naturals came in a pretty hefty chunk, so as soon as another round of essential oils arrives from Mountain Rose Herbs I'm going to try another scent combination if the sweet orange scent isn't your thing. There's lavender in this batch, and some tangerine oil; I may combine the two of them and see how that goes. (I'd have tried for lime or similar, but they're out of stock on lime.)

The essential oils arrived yesterday. I'm gonna try and get the shampoo made tonight. Since I'm planning on a trip into Cambridge for early Christmas shopping this weekend, I may also stop off at Cambridge Naturals and get some beeswax (Whole Foods doesn't always have beeswax other than candles) and possibly cocoa butter if I run out on the shampoo; once I've taken the shampoo bars out of their molds to age I can use the same molds for another batch of honey-beeswax soap for people's Christmas gifts.

Scents for the honey beeswax soap will probably be sweet orange oil plus some cedar unless Cambridge Naturals has a different base note that works better or for some reason has a sale on sandalwood or patchouli essential oil or something. Bear in mind that there will only be a tiny bit of the other scent- in a recipe with 44 ounces of saponifying oil, there'd be like 2 ounces of sweet orange essential oil and 1/4 ounce of whatever the other EO is. (The original recipe calls for frankincense EO, but frankincense is hellaciously expensive, whereas patchouli and sandalwood are merely ridiculously expensive.)

Looking at various soap molds today, since a design other than 'sliced rectangle' probably holds more visual appeal. I'm kinda tempted to get one with bees on it for future batches of honey-beeswax soap, assuming that works out well for the people who use it. Not sure what I'd do for a shampoo bar, though. Maybe just oval.

Also going over various sites about perfuming and essential oil blends and whatnot, just to see what I can find about the best way to sort these things out. For something like the honey-beeswax soap it's simple- HERE HAVE ORANGE and oh yeah cedar. For something like the shampoo, I need to work the details out a bit more. Most people who've sniffed the cinnamon-clove-ginger shampoo very much liked the smell, but I've had one report of it smelling awful after a trip through the post. Don't know if that's the case all around or if it's a case of personal biochemistry being different, but either way tweaking the balance of cinnamon versus clove should alter that, plus I may want to put actual ginger essential oil in instead of ginger powder or grated ginger. The other shampoo bar has pine, cedar, and eucalyptus and the end result was weirdly anise for me, so I wanna balance that scent out properly...

dear high school AP chemistry teacher who was the worst AP teacher I have ever had for anything ever, screw you. I've decided to be an alchemist instead.

I have three addresses to send soap to, and for some reason I thought I had four. One batch is going to Delaware, one to New Mexico, and one to Oregon. If you gave me an address and I am missing it, let me know. Thanks.

It smells quite nice and the residue on my fingers foamed up very well indeed when I washed them off afterwards. In about a week I'll give it an initial test before sending pieces out to people who asked.

Bought the orange oil and the beeswax last night at Whole Foods instead of Cambridge Naturals; my head was pounding and I didn't think either the red line or a Hubway ride was a good idea. I got home and realized I just wanted to sit down and relax until my head stopped hurting, because it felt like I was coming down with something. To be on the safe side I fired up my computer and pulled up Bejeweled 3.

Long story short, I did horribly compared to how well I usually play, so I figured that if I was having a bad time of it being quick enough on the draw to handle a simple match 3 video game, I should stay away from anything involving lye or hot oil. I'm still not feeling well, but if I'm feeling better this evening I'll give it a go. Otherwise, I'm gonna try for a Friday batch.

Poked through my soap recipes to see what looked like it might be a good idea to test with you guys. Options so far:

- Beeswax-and-honey soap, which would involve coconut oil, olive oil, soybean shortening, beeswax, water, lye, honey, orange essential oil, and cedar essential oil
- Cocoa butter soap, which involves castor oil, cocoa butter*, coconut oil, olive oil, palm** or soybean shortening***, water, lye, lemongrass essential oil, lavender essential oil, and cedar essential oil
- Cinnamon-clove-ginger shampoo bar, which uses castor oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter, jojoba, olive oil, lye, cinnamon leaf essential oil, clove bud essential oil, some ground ginger, some ground clove, one egg yolk, and water
- Extremely mild ('baby') soap, which uses olive oil, palm or soybean shortening, coconut oil, water, lye, and lavender or no essential oil
- Hemp soap, which Bing can tell you about; this is coconut oil, palm or soybean shortening, hemp oil, olive oil, castor oil, and peppermint and/or spearmint essential oils
- Coffee kitchen deodorizing soap, which is olive oil, palm or soybean shortening, coconut oil, water, lye, and coffee grounds
- Extremely basic soap: olive oil, castor or coconut oil, lye, water, and some form of essential oil

I can change the essential oils, obviously, and my shampoo bar original recipe didn't include the powdered spices, but they made up for the fact that I was pretty low on essential oils otherwise. And I can offer fragrance free versions if people would prefer to test something like that instead. The coffee soap is something of a novelty but is apparently supposed to be quite good at removing the stink of garlic and onions from hands. The basic soap has both olive and either coconut or castor because 100% olive oil soaps can have a weird, almost slimy feel to them.

I've made the shampoo bar in the past and tested it on my own hair and skin repeatedly. I've also made and used the hemp soap, and a version of the basic soap that's been pretty nice. (Plus it worked rather well when I grated it up super fine and mixed it with washing soda and borax for laundry powder. EDIT: I forgot I made up a batch of the hardest, least superfatted soap I could just to make into laundry soap. I have ground up the basic stuff to use for bubble bath, which is a different matter.) I'll be happy to test any of these on myself, but one person's not much of a sample size, so folks who'd be interested in one of the others or who have a specific combo they're interested in, let me know.


*I intend to use fair trade cocoa butter since I know how the chocolate industry can be towards its growers/producers
**Palm oil is ethically/environmentally questionable at best, but so far whenever I've used it I've used sustainably produced palm oil and plan to keep doing so
***Theoretically the things marked 'soy or palm shortening' could be made with Crisco but honestly, I'm not entirely sure what the hell Crisco's saponification number is, especially if they tweak the amount of soy oil vs. palm oil or any of the other additives, so why take a chance

Aaaand the first batch of soap I've made in a few years is now sitting in my oven. Not because it needs to be cooked but because it's the easiest way to keep it safe from the cats. It'll eventually be moved into the insulated closet under the slanting part of the roof instead, because I need that oven, but for now we're good.

I need to get a picture of myself in my safety gear for mixing soap. It's not Breaking Bad-caliber, but the chemical goggles, breathing mask (admittedly it's a particulate respirator rather than a vapor filter but it still helps), and rubber gloves up to my elbows... eh, I just want a picture.