Soap Making: Attempt #1

Four months have passed since we took our soap making class at The Nova Studio, and we finally made our first batch tonight. Woo Hoo! It took us for-ev-er to gather all the supplies we needed, and in the end we still bought a big ole bucket of SoapQuick from the local Mission Peak Soap, because we simply don't want to store 5 or 10 random jugs of oils in our one bedroom apartment. We found a bunch of recipes that sounded appealing on Magestic Mountain Sage, so earlier this week we finally sat down, picked a few, and ordered the fragrance oils and other fun little additives to make them. The shipping was super speedy and I got everything this morning, so we made some tonight! Clearly our only barrier was gathering the supplies. Now that we've got 'em, there's no stopping us!

As for our first experience, it was:

• A little scary. Lye--EEK!
• A little frustrating. We forgot about our beeswax until after we had already blended the oils and lye, so we just melted it really quick and threw it in. We're a little concerned about there being little beeswax clumps throughout the soap because we're not sure we were able to get it fully integrated at that point, but we figured it was better to add it late than never, considering it was factored into our oil/lye calculation. I also learned that I don't know how to read a thermometer.
• And a little fun and exciting! This is me doing my "we're making soap" dance:

And here's a shot of the final batch. Cross your fingers that we didn't totally screw it up! Btw, this our version of the Energy Soap recipe from the Sage. We just substituted SoapQuick for the oils listed here, but used the same extras (beeswax, rose hip powder, and energy fragrance--mango/papaya/lime--smelled so yummy!)