I haven't been on in a week or more and there is SO MUCH SOAP PORN to drool over. Seriously, looks like a mixture of well executed soaps and a few gorgeous looking accidents here and there. I have a MONSTROSITY to post so y'all can feel better about your soaps. This is a twice re-batched and sloppily cut bar of mugwort castile. I used HP using an 8% superfat and saving 5% of the oil till the end. That 5% was olive oil infused with 25 grams of mugwort. I used a teaspoon of salt in the two pound batch as a hardening agent, and it came out brittle. I re-batched it with a decoction of another 25 grams of mugwort, so this time I had both the oil soluble and the water soluble constituents of the herb incorporated without any of it coming in contact with the lye. It came out too liquidy, from too much decoction. I tried freezing it, but it would go back to glop when it thawed, and would crumble when I cut it frozen. I put the whole batch back on the stove, and cooked away a lot of the water, molded it up again, and had to freeze it to make it solid enough to cut. Even then it was still glopy in the middle. Since then it has been hardening up nicely, but it isn't pretty, which is fine cause it's just for personal use.
The other soap was more of a success. I finally have a HP method that has worked twice the same way. I used Tomato Leaf FO from BB and chrome green as the pigment that I added during the cook so as to allow it to evenly distribute. It doesn't smell exactly like tomato leaf, it's a much more floral perfume smell but still very nice. Not sure what to call it if I ever market it because I worry about getting peoples hopes up for it to smell just like tomato leaf. I did this batch for party favors for my birthday. It was a rather wild party and there ended up being a lot more guests than bars of soap but I wasn't diligent about making sure the people who wanted soap remembered theirs on the way out the door, so I still have a few bars.
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