Scrumptious looking soap, Purplemolly! My three year old girl saw this pic and said, "mmmmmmmm!"
Thanks for the many compliments everyone
To answer some specifics; yes soapchick this is crazy labor intensive stuff, involving custom built equipment (I worked for years as a professional carpenter) for an experiment that looked like it was doomed to failure from the start, but yielded some pretty bars.
cat040876 and wildchild, the quickest explanation I can give here is that I designed something like a giant butter churn that I have been putting thin ribbons of m&p into and then churn it until it juuuuust turns to a paste, let it set, remove brick, cut and bam - pretty soaps. With this I tried cutting barely solidified soap into large pieces, gave them all a generous coat of silver mica mixed with glycerin and popped them into the churn. I had hoped to be able to kind of mash the stuff together into a paste, but the individual pieces were too big. Did you ever open a bag of marshmallows on a humid day, and find that they are all loosely stuck together? That is what this looked like. I let it set for a while and hand cut a few bars, surprised at how well some of this has held together. I started out with 7 lbs of clear m&p base, total weight of finished bars: just under 5 lbs ( that is around 30% waste).
So pretty as that soap is, it was a total pain in the keester that I won't be able to produce a lot of. But what a look tho
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
It was a pain in the "you know what" to do but I was really pleased with the way the frosting came out - thanks A-M for the tutorial on soapqueentv!! Took one of each to work today and everyone just kept sniffing them!!!! Just as well the FO lasts or I'd be in trouble.