Cherry Soap Status...

Here she is... we need to add more cherry next time (about double) but it's looking good so far! The plain white bar is the base that was made the day prior as a tester it's the olive & coconut oil but no cherries.

No Green Soap 4 Us...

Were only seeing PURPLE today while working on the Wine-Oh soap. It's made with olive, coconut & castor oils. Plus dried grapes for a fabulous purple color... I hope!

Also, our molds are sticking to the soap too much so I'm trying a more flexible plastic mold that is also smaller today so I'm hoping that works too.
WISH US LUCK!!

Cherry Soap Saponifying

The olive & coconut oil in our base BATCH#4 worked great so I'm mixing up BATCH#5 the same way and this time were adding our dried & ground Door County cherries. According to what we've read you add any scents like essential oils or dried fruit & flowers at the end after the soap is done cooking. I'm assuming this is to preserve the smell and maybe even the color. So far our dried cherries are a nice bright red color and still smell like cherries so hopefully both those traits transfer over to the cured soap.

The book has a chamomile tea soap where they use dried & ground tea leaves about 1/4 to 1/2 cup it says. We've got a little under 1/4 cup dried cherries prepped so we'll see how that amount works and work up if needed.

Batch#4 saponifyin'

We're making a batch this afternoon with olive oil and coconut oil. We also crushed de-juiced and are now dehydrating the grape skins to be ground up later that will be add to make our Wine-Oh soap next week.
Today is all about getting a base down for that batch and the cherry batch. Olive oil has moderate conditioning properties and creates a very hard soap. Coconut oil on the other hand is very low on the conditioning scale and is also high on the hardness scale. They should balance well meaning the end product should leave your hands clean but not strip them too much of their natural oils. If this turns out well it may be our base for two different batches. I also choose these oils because they should create the whitest base for the cherry and grape colors to really show through. We want the crushed cherry to make a really pinkish red color while the grape we'd ideally want to be as purple as possible so the two look different. That is also why we used the dark "black grapes".

Batch#3

Saponifying our next base in the kitchen this afternoon. We're experimenting with a olive, coconut, canola, palm & soybean oil mixture this time. It's a bright golden color right now (almost the same color as the walls). This should be a pretty hard soap with a good lather and also condition moderately. Since Batch#2 was soft as clay we had to scoop it out of the mold and form it into balls to use at home... well now we know. Hopefully this batch is hard enough to get out of the molds in 1 piece and have a great color!