My Midweek Weekend Report
On Sunday evening I was mentally composing an entry that I have just now gotten around to writing. My mental entry didn’t have this preface and my mental entry referred to "today" and "yesterday" instead of Saturday and Sunday.
My weekend went well. It was half relaxation and half getting stuff done that I’ve been putting off. I fully intended to make a batch of soap on Saturday and then another, different batch on Sunday. Saturday was nap day. I’m a bit amazed that I can do so little for a full day and then still crash that night and sleep like a log. Instead of two batches of soap over two days I did both batches of soap on Sunday.
The first batchof soap was Pumpkin Pie soap. I used a pretty plain soap base (Olive/Palm/Coconum/Castor oils) and added pumpkin pie filling (about 3oz for the 3lb soap batch), allspice to give it that pumpkin pie smell and some cinnamon in clove oil fragrance, not much, just a bit to bring up the cinnamonny smell. I poured this soap into a Wilton silicon baking mold of leaves and pumpkins and then poured the lefover into a plain, square bar mold. There were six leaves/pumpkins and eight square bars. I stuck these into a pre warmed oven to make sure the smaller leaves/pumpkins would stay warm enough to go through the gel phase.
The leaves/pumpkins came out looking great the next morning, but the square bars all had a layer of oil on top. Too much oil could mean too little lye in the mixture, but that should have affected the leaves/pumpkins too. Something else caused this problem. The first possibility is too much moisture in the mix. I cut back on the amount of water to match the amount of pumpkin filling I added, but if I left in too much water I might just have a very moist batch of soap. The oily output from the bottom of the batch could be this extra moisture–oil floats on water–so the floating part would have less water just like it was supposed to. The second possibility is that the cinnamon in clove oil isn’t a trigliceride oil. That would prevent the lye from turning it into soap with the rest of the oils and leave extra "oil" unprocessed. In any case, all the bars are airing out and will hopefully be wonderful closer to Christmas.
The second batch of soap was my planned Hurricane Honeysuckle. I made this using the hot process, so there’s my other aliterative ‘H’. Hurricane Honeysuckle Hot-process soap. I used the same soap base that I used for the Pumpkin Pie soap and used rainwater that I gathered from Hurricane Sandy. I took the soap all the way through the process in the crock pot. At the end, I added the Honeysuckle fragrance. Mrs. Ender had been asking me for a soap that really smells–most of my other soap has fragrance but no so much that you can’t smell it without concentrating–so I deliberatly added extra fragrance. I may have accdentally added too much fragrance because the whole house reeked of Honeysuckle. After a while, Honeysuckle stops being an attractive smell, in case you ever consider filling your house with that smell. I do believe that a lot of the scent will leave the soap as it airs out. And that is why the rest of my soap doesn’t have enough scent, I put in the ‘right’ amount when the soap is fresh but that scent wears off as the soap ages. By the time that soap is used it barely has enough scent for anyone to know what it was in the first place.
The second batch of soap is technically usable now since the hot process insures that all of the lye has reacted with the oils. But giving the bars a week or two to season results in a nice firm bar of soap. Oh, I also removed a small portion of the batch before I scooped it into the mold. I added red coloring to that portion and put it in between layers of the plain (i.e. whitish) soap. My intent was to give an ominous flash of red for the "hurricane" part of the receipe. My "red" turned out to be more "pink", so my soap is giving a flash of not-so-hurricanish pink.
My weekend entry was delayed by work. Our major technology vendor "upgraded" their backend systems and although it was not supposed to affect the front-end, we have spent all week, and will probably add some more hours during the holiday, making sure that everything goes back to what we expect our customers to see. Luckily, we have a tool that lets us easily compare the thousands of items in the 100-or-so bundles against what these bundles looked like before the "upgrade." Oh, yeah, that would be my tool. Score a big one for the guy that gets lazy and automates anything that sits still long enought to be automated.
Other than that, I’ve got nothing to report.
Ender is out.