The peacock swirl is a technique I’ve admired for a long time but never had the guts to try before, so the challenge was just the kick in the pants I needed! Right, on to the pictures, then.

The patterned portion of the soap is only approximately the top 1/3 of the bar. The bottom 2/3 is made up of uncolored soap mixed with light green soap shreds to give it a bit more character. This lower portion of the soap contains the only fragrance in the batch (Mediterranean Silk, a summer favorite of mine, soft and fresh and lightly floral), to make sure the top, colored portion behaved itself nicely when creating the pattern. Then comes the color!

Starting to layer the colors into the mold.

Once all of the blues, green, and white soap had been added, one squiggly layer at a time, I put down a row of gold mica lines on top:

Finished adding color.

Now it’s time to start drawing. My next step was made with a not-wide-enough comb for the mold, so I had to take two passes, and it created a burble in the middle. But I actually kind of liked the effect.

Color combing!

Then the finishing touch:

Skewer time.

When I finished making this soap, I just sat there and stared at it for several minutes before I put the lid on and put it to bed. I was mesmerized by it, and I am totally in love with this technique now!

Finished pattern.

The next day, when it was time to cut the soap, I was really nervous. I was worried about messing up my pretty pattern by doing something stupid when cutting!

Deep breaths . . . cut!

…but as it happened, I think it turned out all right.

Cutting complete. See the soap shreds in the bottom part?

Watch for this soap to show up in the store – it’s already curing nicely, so it probably won’t be long. Drop me a message if you’d like to reserve a bar!

Seriously, I am in complete awe of the response I got to my request for donations to this cause. You are all incredible people. Thank you for helping!

However, remember you can get a coupon for 30% off a future order by contributing to the soap collection. Read about how to do it here.

Thanks, everyone – and I’ll have a more standard sale in a few weeks!

I have been packing up soap for the last day and a half to send to Moore, OK. I don’t know if they’ll hand it out to people who are staying in the university dorms or other shelters due to having lost their homes, or if they’ll keep it for use by the people who are coming down to help clean up, but either way, it’s bound to come in handy.

Where you come in is this: I can send a fair bit of stuff on my own; I may not be able to spare an overwhelming amount of cash at any given time, but soap I usually have in plenty. HOWEVER, I am willing to bet they can use all the soap (bar and liquid both, and probably shampoo and conditioner and lotion, too) that they can get, so I’m offering you the chance to help me help them.

Here’s how it works: Purchase any items at our Etsy store (https://www.etsy.com/shop/FoamOnTheRange) using coupon code MOOREOK, and you will receive a 70% discount on the purchase, and I will ship the items you purchased DIRECTLY to one of the donation addresses which have been provided. After your purchase, you will receive a coupon code good for 30% off a future purchase as well, to thank you for helping.

If you don’t want to pick out specific items to send, use the above coupon code to buy a gift certificate (we have $10, $25, and $50 denominations) and I’ll put together a donation packet of the appropriate size.

I will very likely batch multiple purchases together into single boxes for more efficient shipping. If this results in my having collected more than $10 more in shipping fees than I end up spending, I will donate the excess to the Red Cross.

Thank you for reading, and please share the word.

Pouring soap into the mold.

After talking a bit about the history and science of soap, I fired up the soapmaking apparatus and demonstrated how it’s made. The kids stayed several feet back while the mixing part was going on, obviously, but they loved watching the process, and once the blending was done I let them file past and take a look at the soap in the mold.

One batch down, one ready to go.

Then I put together a second batch, of Waste Not, which is the soap I had handed out pieces of as samples. This went pretty quickly, and then they asked a really surprising number of excellent questions.

A good time was had by all, and I think there’s a good chance I’ll be back next year to do it again!

Oh, and the first demo soap was cut this morning:

Melon Melon Melon

Fragrances: Organized!

It’s not the world’s best photo, partly because I haven’t installed the new lighting yet. It does convey the general idea, though. It is a 4′ wide, 6′ tall bookcase, sized for mass-market paperbacks, which I have converted to fragrance oil storage. Several shelves are stacked two or three bottles deep, and there are two shelves above the photographed area which are still unfilled; I expect to fill them with smaller bottles of oils and extracts.

So: It’s only a beginning, but it feels pretty good to have one piece of the project finished – and also to have the fragrances organized MUCH better than they have ever been before. Next up: Establishing a place in the new studio to set up storage for packaging and containers awaiting use.

Bright, summery spots!

Still not perfect, perhaps, but definitely well within the parameters of what I was aiming for. Plus, it’s just cheerful. This soap makes me happy!

Next up: Peacock Swirl – I’ll be giving this a test run at a demo next week, and we’ll see how it goes. If it implodes spectacularly, the demo will be extra interesting!

Let’s back up a bit. The reaction of an acid with a base is one of the first and simplest reactions demonstrated in elementary chemistry, and plays a role in everything from grade school science fair volcano eruptions (baking soda + vinegar) to the rising action of quick breads (baking soda again, with buttermilk and/or cream of tartar). Most of these reactions produce fizz and heat, but one thing every single one of them produces is salt. No, not (usually) NaCl/table salt, but still, salt.

Let’s back up a bit more. An acid/base reaction which does produce table salt is this:

NaOH + HCl –> NaCl + H2O

Sodium hydroxide (lye, caustic soda) added to hydrochloric acid produces table salt and water. When you look at it that way, a salt can be handwavingly described as the front half of a base and the back half of an acid joining up, and leaving the remainder of their original compounds to fend for themselves and find new compounds to be part of. In the above reaction, it’s pretty simple, but some reactions of this category are a bit more complex.

What does all this have with soap and saponification? Well, saponification is, at its heart, an acid-base reaction. Wait, what? Acid? Yes, acid, though it’s true they’re not what we traditionally think of as acids. I’ve talked before about triglycerides and fatty acids (and indeed touched on several of these points at that time), and it’s those which provide the other half of this reaction. A triglyceride molecule is a big, unwieldy thing; it has one “head” – the “glyceride” part – and three long “tails” – the fatty acid chains. The first step in the saponification reaction is to knock the head off from the tails, leaving the head and the tails both free to react with something new. This step requires the presence of water, which is part of why we dissolve our lye crystals in water when making soap (the other reason is that without dissolving in something very like water, NaOH will not separate (“disassociate”) into Na+ and OH- ions and therefore will not be able to enter into chemical reactions). After this, the sodium from the sodium hydroxide binds to the fatty acids, creating soap, and the former glyceride “head” binds to the oxygen and hydrogen (the “hydroxide” portion) from the sodium hydroxide, creating glycerol, which we usually refer to as glycerin.

Image credit: V8rik at en.wikipedia.

Here’s a picture to help that make a bit more sense. The “R”s in this picture represent long fatty acid chains, shortened this way so we can concentrate on the bits of the molecules which are participating in the chemical reaction. On the left is a triglyceride molecule. The arrow represents the reaction with water and sodium hydroxide/lye, and on the right are three soap molecules and one glycerol. The reaction is the same with potassium hydroxide, by the way, for making liquid soaps.

OK, so, that’s a whole big pile of chemistry talk. I’ll be honest, I don’t really spend a whole lot of time thinking about the nuts and bolts of the chemistry when I’m actually making soap, but there are a few things which I try to keep in mind. For one thing, the early part of this reaction requires heat, but a later part generates it – which is part of what creates the “sweet spot” of heat when soaping. Too cold and the reaction will take a very long time to complete – several days or even a week; too hot and it will create a runaway chain reaction and you’ll end up with a soap volcano. It explains the function water plays in the process, and why we don’t want to discount our water too steeply when soaping. It explains where the glycerin that is part of the reason handmade soap is so awesome has come from.

Anyway, why is saponification such a significant reaction? Well, you know the old saying about how oil and water don’t mix? Which, true, they don’t. There are two general categories of substances, and by and large, things will only mix with other things from the same category as themselves. So you can mix olive oil and canola oil, and you can mix water and beer, but if for some insane reason you wanted to mix olive oil and beer, you’d be out of luck. Which in that case is probably a good thing, because, eww. But saponification produces a molecule which is one kind of substance – the Na and O end of the thing – at one end, and the other kind – the fatty acid tail – at the other. So it is able to stick to oily, yucky, dirty stuff with the tail, and then the other end is able to hook up with water and wash the whole mess away, soap and dirt alike. Neat, huh? (Chemists call this kind of molecule “amphiphilic”, but we don’t need to worry about that.)

So, suds up – soap is awesome!

While I was convalescing (for which read: sitting on the couch under a giant heap of blankets trying to find sedentary-yet-productive things to do, then getting up and trying to Do Something in the soap room and dropping product on my foot or knocking things off of tables or falling down and being roundly scolded by my husband for trying to cause a relapse, and then slinking back to the couch in shame to resume my boredom), I spent some effort on trying to come up with ways to make this not happen again.

What I came up with: The novel concept of taking off three or four hours per week (which, let’s face it, still leaves plenty of time to work about 100 hours in said week), LEAVING THE HOUSE (because otherwise we’d both keep working despite our best intentions), and going to dinner and a movie or some similar date-like endeavor. It seemed like a great plan! We love movies but generally don’t get to see them all that often (Avengers had been out for MONTHS before we saw it last year, despite the intersection of “superheroes” and “Joss Whedon” in the Venn diagram of entertainment pretty much pegging out the awesome-meter so far as we’re concerned), plus cell phones and other mobile devices are banned in the theater so our not-working would be enforced by an outside party, and there’d be a set length of time in which we would Not Be Working.

So, once I was past enough of the worst of the sickness that I was able to venture forth from the couch, we implemented this plan. Off we went to try to round up some lingering end-of-year movies. The plan worked like a charm! We went . . . twice. The third week, we just plain forgot to go, when the scheduled day came around. The fourth week, we had some excuse or other. And by the fifth, the plan had evaporated, poof. No more scheduled time off for us!

Flash forward to now, mid-May, as we are making an effort to start the plan back up again. We have, in fact, taken off about four hours yesterday afternoon (We saw Iron Man Three!), and it was . . . really, really hard. I mean, the movie was fantastic! But I wanted to check my e-mail for customer inquiries, and make notes of new product ideas I came up with, and add things to my to-do list, and fire up my phone to tinker with sales listings, and it was incredibly difficult to focus on the Things Blowing Up on-screen instead. And when we went out for coffee after the movie? We pretty much talked shop the whole time.

But it’s a start, right? And maybe we’ll even remember to do it again next week!

Peppermint Liquid/Gel Hand Soap

With the discontinuation of the Foaming Liquid Soap, I thought I should make sure everyone is aware of our newish (introduced in the last three months or so) gel-style liquid hand soaps. Similar in consistency to our shower gels, these liquid soap pumps are great to keep at your primary handwashing sink for those occasions when bar soap just isn’t quite right for the job.

Here’s the listing text description: Made with care via hot process soapmaking, this soap serves as a beautiful accent for kitchen or bathroom sink, in addition to being fantastic for your skin. Carefully formulated with the perfect oil blend for great lather and skin conditioning!

You can find our current selection of gel soaps here - and remember, if you’d like a fragrance you don’t see listed, or would prefer an uncolored version of one of the soaps, I can probably help you out! Just drop me a message and I’ll see what I can do.