My very first soap  ?

Today I made my very first (trial) batch of soap–all on my own! ?

I told myself that 2022 will be a year of further pushing boundaries. I’d like to have the courage to learn more of the things that make me feel uncomfortable. I have long watched my sister make soaps. We’ve had in-person soap making classes prior the pandemic and I have always been on the sidelines watching her do it… But I never really made MY OWN soap until today.

So I brought out some of our soap making tools and supplies to venture out in actually making my very first loaf. I’m still too scared to mess it up so I decided to use this trial batch size of mold from Brambleberry.

I decided to use a very basic mix of oils–Coconut, Sunflower, Olive, and Castor Oil. And since I’ve had this unopened bottle of Wasabi fragrance oil (FO) from Brambleberry, I decided to use that for my maiden batch. I was a bit surprised on how amber-colored this FO was. It basically discolored by entire soap batter.

I intended to use 2 colors, with the majority of it retaining its natural color, and the rest of it with pink. I wanted to add a little dried chamomile so I did just that with the original tainted yellowish batter.

Of course I wanted to do some swirls but the FO accelerated trace real fast so I guess I didn’t have time for that. Plus, I also added some sodium lactate in this batch so I can unmold it by tomorrow. Do note that sodium lactate makes your batter harder so it also affects the trace.

I guess another challenge for soapmakers is that you’d have to be quick in thinking of a back-up design if in case your batter behaves differently than what you’re intending. With this, I was left with no choice but to use the middle-peak textured-top soap design.

UPDATE: 2 hours into making the soap, I noticed it went into gel phase. ???

More about gel phase on my next blog but fingers-crossed on how it will turn out once we unmold this batch by tomorrow. ???

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