Happy Accidents

Hiya, Wonder Turtle friends! Sorry it's been so quiet around here. It has been ca-razy here for the past couple of weeks between popping in and out of town, getting ready for a craft show, and working on a soapy order for a dear friend!

(By the way, tomorrow, Saturday, November 20, I will be at the Santa's Workshop Craft Show at the Navarre Conference Center from 9-4, so if you're in the Navarre, FL area, please drop by and say howdy!)

Anyway, I recently had an awesome happy accident. You know how you have one thing in mind and it doesn't work out, but what emerges is still just as cool or even cooler? That's what happened to me in the soaping kitchen a little while back.

I was making some Lavender soap with my loaf mold, and I was aiming for a particular effect. I've seen two-layered soaps, especially cold-process soaps, that have a bottom layer that's one color with another layer on top of it that's another color. The two layers kinda mingle just a little bit, making the middle a little wispy and uneven.

Here's what I said to myself: I'll bet I could do that with melt-and-pour. I'll just pour a layer of one color halfway up my mold, and then immediately pour another color the rest of the way up. It'll be like when I double-pour side-by-side except this time I'll pour up-and-down - the colors will each stay on their side as long as I pour cool enough. 

Yeah, I know. It sounds ridiculous to me now as I type it, but that was what was going through the ol' noggin. Unfortunately, when I was concocting this plan, I forgot about the existence of a very minor thing called gravity.

So, I poured my cooled purple layer of Lavender-scented goat's milk soap halfway up the mold. So far so good. Then I immediately poured my cooled layer of white soap on top of it. For some reason, I was surprised when the white soap just disappeared into the purple soap, which rose to the top of the mold. To make matters worse, ugly patches of white mottled the surface of the purple soap.

"Well, fiddlesticks, that didn't work!" I muttered to myself. (Those of you who know me probably can guess that is not exactly what I said, but, hey, this is a family show.) I was tempted to just pour the soap out of the mold, mix it all together to make a uniform purple loaf, and repour. But I thought, No, just leave it alone and see how it turns out.

The next day, I nervously picked up my mold and inspected it. When I flipped it over to see the top, I felt my hopes stir. The white soap had pooled at the bottom (or top, really) in an intruiging way, and I wondered if the middle of the soap looked just as interesting. I popped it out of the mold and eagerly cut into it.

And, boy, was I glad that I had left it alone! Delicate swirls of purple wafted around the white portions of soap, like I had totally intended for that to happen. I had accidentally discovered a really cool technique that I can actually use.

I love a happy ending. Have you, dear readers, had any happy accidents of your own, soaping or otherwise? Please do share - Wally the Wonder Turtle and I would love to hear about them!

Broken layer, broken heart ...

My layered Fresh Snow soap was going to be so beautiful. I was going to sandwich layers of crisp blue and light blue between pure-driven white. Glitter suspended in the blue portion would look like snowflakes drifting to the ice-covered ground below.

Wowza, look at that!

It was going to be gorgeous, I tells ya.

And it was ...

Until it fell apart.

Sigh. Such is the soaping life. Sometimes, no matter how careful you are or how much rubbing alcohol you spritz, you mess things up. And, ooh, how do I hate to mess things up. I live in constant fear of messing things up. Which usually just makes me more nervous and therefore more likely to mess up.

And me getting "more nervous" is very serious business. I am already nervous as it is. I haven't had fingernails since 1989. My spirit animal would probably be the squirrel, either running or freezing at every threat (and threats are around every corner). Make me "more nervous" and I'm like a paranoid schizophrenic squirrel on crack. It's not good, and it's not very conducive to crafting (or anything else, really). And we're just talking about soap here - it's not like I'm performing brain surgery or piloting a commercial jumbo-jet.

Bummer.

Anyway, I kinda thought this might happen. When I poured the first white layer (the layer that popped off), it took forever to set up. It has been really hot here in Florida lately, so maybe my house was too warm, I don't know. But it just would not set up. And as you soapers know, timing and temperature are crucial when layering. You have to pour as soon as the previous layer is ready, and that layer still needs to be warm. Time was ticking away and the skin on the soap still wasn't thick enough. Eternal optimist that I am, I was thinking, "This will never work. This is taking way too long."

I plowed ahead, though, and finished up the soap in the hopes that maybe everything would work out and be okay somehow (always a bad strategy). Interestingly, the blue layers set up very fast - almost too fast - and this had me worried, too. Those layers stayed together, though.

I rarely have layers pop apart on me. I hate having a layered loaf fall apart on me for many reasons. First of all, it seriously shakes my confidence, which, as I explained earlier, is not good for squirrel-like people. Second, I feel like I wasted a day making something ineffective. Third, I have to spend another day salvaging the soap and fixing the problem. And fourth, I then have to hope that my fix worked, or else I'll be looking at three wasted days.

Fortunately, melt-and-pour soap is as forgiving as a favorite pair of sweatpants. If you screw up, just cut it up, melt it down, and try again.

That's what I did. Instead of trying to dissect all of the layers and repour them, I thought maybe a solid light blue bar might be nice. Simple, sophisticated, no chance of falling apart.

So, I poured it all into my loaf mold again. (I had to use two 4-cup measuring glasses because it wouldn't all fit in one and 4-cup is the largest capacity measuring glass I have. Maybe it's time to get an 8-cup glass.)

Here's the result. Pretty blue with a dusting of irridescent glitter on the tops. I like the way it turned out, and I hope others will, too.

Ah, melt-and-pour, thank you for your flexibility. You are never truly wasted, although some projects just can't feasibly be brought back to square one again. But even if the effect fails, the soap doesn't.

I Want Some Patience and I Want It RIGHT NOW!

Remember the Seinfeld episode where George Costanza's father goes around screaming, "Serenity now!" at the top of his lungs? That's how I felt after slaving over a batch of layered soap bars a couple of days ago.

I was making my triple-layered Black Rose soaps. The first layer was soft pink, the second layer black, and the third layer was more soft pink.  I was working on a batch of six bars; four turned out great. Two were goners.

This is what the Black Rose soaps are supposed to look like. Here are two of the successful bars.

What happened?

Well, anyone who has done layered melt-and-pour projects before knows that temperature and timing are crucial. If you pour too soon, your soap may be too hot and could melt the layer beneath. Pour too late, and the layers might not adhere. Get caught between these two, and you might have a problem.

I got caught between the two.

The first two layers of each bar went fine. It was on the third layer where I got tripped up. See, I had allowed 5 ounces for each bar, making a total of 30 ounces. That's 10 ounces per layer: 20 ounces of pink, 10 ounces of black.

Ten ounces of pink was great for the first layer. Ten ounces of black worked great for the second layer. Ten ounces of pink for the third proved problematic.

Here's a photo for comparison. See how the nice soap on the top has a clean, straight line of black? And how the two soaps on the bottom have uneven melty black layers with tendrils of black running through the bottom pink layer? Blech.

The third layer of pink for bars 1-4 poured just fine. But by bars 5 and 6, the soap was starting to cool too much and it was getting tacky and gloppy. So I heated what was left in my measuring cup for a few seconds in the microwave.

I took its temperature. I usually pour my layers around 110-115 degrees so I don't melt the layer below it. But it's kinda difficult to get an accurate temperature read on so little soap in a big measuring glass. I dipped my spoon into the base and dripped some of the melted base on my finger. Warm, but not hot.

I wondered if it needed a little more time to cool. But when I stirred it, it felt like it was getting tacky again and a skin was forming on it.

And it was time to pour. The second layer had hardened up and really needed its third layer NOW.

I figured, "It's probably cool enough. It's getting thick and I need to pour."

So I poured it, slowly and gently.

And?

Yep, you guessed it ... I melted the black layer beneath on both bars.

Pools of black floated to the surface of the pink, and little wispy melt lines reached their dreadful tendril-y fingers upward.

Awesome.

What did I learn? Well, I think next time I will start out with more soap base than I need. I had figured that I needed 20 ounces of pink. If I could have a mulligan and do it over again, I would start with 24 ounces instead so maybe I'd still have enough liquidy soap to at least finish all of my pours even if an ounce or two of the soap gets tacky and sticks to the sides of the glass. It is always better to have too much soap prepared than to not have enough.

And I will be more patient. It's a bit heartbreaking to work on a batch and then ruin some of them (especially on the last pour) because you pressured yourself to pour RIGHT NOW.

Ah, well, four out of six ain't bad. And the four that did turn out were a great success, and I am very happy with them. Heck, I can always make more.

Psst ... you can get one of these Black Rose soaps at my Etsy shop. Don't worry - I'll send you one of the pretty ones!

And, hey, Mother's Day is tomorrow. I can give my mom the prettiest one of the reject bars as a gift. And she has to say it's beautiful because I made it and she's my mom, right?

Right?

(Have soaping tragedy stories of your own? Share them with us! Wally the Wonder Turtle and I would love to hear them!)

Zen and the Art of Soaping?

I have never been referred to as a "relaxed person," unless the person referring to me is being sarcastic. And I want to be perfect, which, of course, is impossible. The ever-present threat of impending imperfection (gasp!) hanging over me makes me nervous.

See, I am a planner. I have a very clear picture in my mind of how I want something to look, or how I want something to go. If things go awry, it throws me off. As you can imagine, I am thrown off a lot.

Soaping throws me off sometimes. I will go into a project with a vision -- sometimes I even sketch out a picture first. I consider how many layers I want, how many ounces I want total in my 2.5-pound loaf mold, and then figure out how many ounces of each layer I need.

And it will be beautiful. It has to be beautiful.

Well ...

It would be nice if everything was always beautiful all of the time. But it's not, even when you plan, plan, plan, as if planning is some sort of vaccination against disappointment.

Take this horrifying specimen, for example:

This soap was supposed to depict a dolphin frolicking in the surf. I made a sparkly dolphin embed and shredded some blue and white soap to look like frothy waves ...

Not so much. Sorta, maybe?

It has discolored a bit too, making it even more disgusting. Now, I made this dolphin soap a long, long, long, loooong time ago when I was only a couple of months into soaping. All of the other soaps from this time period were used up eons ago. Why do I still have this particular bar, then? Because for all of this time, I have been too embarrassed to put it in the bathroom's soapdish or even in my own shower. This poor bar cannot be saved. But it can be remelted and re-molded and turned into something new, although it's getting pretty old and may not melt so well. (It still smells good, though, like coconut!)

Fast-forward to just a couple of weeks ago when I made a honeysuckle soap. I had planned to have a layer of pale yellow with yellow and orange chunks, a layer of clear with flower cut-outs floating inside, and another yellow layer with chunks.

Well.

That didn't happen. The chunks stuck out of the first layer and would have intruded into my clear layer. If I poured more yellow to cover the tops of the chunks, the symmetry of the whole bar would be thrown off. So, I abandoned the idea of doing a clear-with-flowers layer in the middle and decided to just do an entire bar of yellow with chunks and then top the bar off with a thin clear layer with some pretty little flowers embedded on top. Even though it was not what I had planned to do, this happy mistake turned out very nicely (way better than that pathetic dolphin soap):

Lesson learned: Don't try to force things. If it's not working out, take it in a new direction and go with it. Relax, it will be fine, and it will probably turn out pretty anyway. Not all mistakes spell disaster. You may be pleasantly surprised when things take a an unexpected turn -- things may turn out way better than what you had pictured in your mind's eye to begin with.

Or you might be not-so-pleasantly-surprised.

But with glycerin soaping, at least you can always remelt if everything just goes to heck.

Oh, if only life were as forgiving as glycerin soaping ...

Hey, maybe there's a life lesson here that can be applied beyond the realm of soaping?

Nah ...