The Eggsperiment

My plastic eggs, from a few weeks ago.  Well I learned a lot!  So here it goes.

Small plastic items are very difficult to use as molds for soap.  And those eggs were really hard to keep steady.  I did try to put the halves together, but that was just a mess.  So I ended up pouring soap into the halves separately and tried to get those to sit somewhere without toppling over.  Of, course I hadn't really prepared anything, just jumped right in and then had all these halves of eggs, full of soap and nowhere to put them!  I'm pretty sure that the whole thing could be executed more successfully by somone with a bit more patience and forethought.

But the fun part about this was making all the different colours and scents and I did have some surprises there.  I made 7 different colours:

1.  The blue.  I made a lovely blue colour using indigo.  I love that colour to bits and I will absolutely make blue soap again.  The perfect scent had to be Peppermint.

2.  The pink.  I used Rumex oil for this and added Neroli essential oil.  The colour didn't turn out pink at all.  Just a beige.  So either I used too much Rumex oil or it doesn't work as well when added to traced soap.  This I need to try out again and find out for sure.

3.  The yellow.  Annatto oil, naturally, with Sweet Orange and Palmarosa scents.  I could have used Sea Buckthorn oil or possibly unrefined Palm oil.  The Annatto came out a slightly orange yellow, but has faded to a nice lighter one.  I'm not a fan of orange yellow.  So quite nice.  I've used Annatto before and I like that yellow and find that it keeps it's colour for at least 6 months (I used the soap up in that time).

4.  The green.  I used dried Parsley and Rosemary for this one.  I should have used a bit more Parsley since the colour was a little light, a yellow green.  I used the dried herb and added it to the traced soap.  I need to try to use it as a tea and see what colour it produces.  I pretty sure that Cocobong uses tea when she uses Nettles for green and she has great results.

5.  The lavender.  Well, no prices for guessing Alkanet infused oil and Lavender scent.  But the Alkanet failed to turn lavender.  It is a very strange shade of light brownish Aubergine.  I have no idea why, except to venture a guess that Alkanet probably wants to be in the oil mix when the lye is added.  So another thing to test.

6.  The orange.  Hah, I'm so stupid!  Just because I could get a lovely orange by adding Annatto and Alkanet to oils, it doesn't work when lye is in the mixture.  I knew that! Silly me!  I'm really quite ashamed.  But I added Lemongras and Ylang ylang to this tan colour.

7.  Uncoloured.  At the last minute I decided to leave the soap uncoloured and add Benzoin for scent.  That colour is just slightly beige and smells lovely.

I could have used vanilla and gotten more brown colours.  But I didn't use Madder root since I would have had to make a special batch of it because it needs to go into the lye.  Nor did I make a black egg, but charcoal soap is quite neat and aniseed would be perfect since it smells a bit like licorice.  So there were quite a few possibilities.  I wanted a bit more colour although I hadn't expected to get really bright colours.  I have to admit that really wanted a bit of pink in there.  Oh, well.  Next time.

But I had an adventure when trying to put the two halves together.  I had thought that it would be easy to just rebatch and whip some soap and use it with a cake decorating thingy (which I bought for use with soap).  Well, I was wrong.  It would probably have been easier with regular whipped soap because it has a stiffer consistency.  This was a fiasko on par with the original chaotic "making-of-the-eggs".  The halves were not even, so I had the hardest time putting them together.  And as is patently obvious from the photo, I've won no prizes for cake decorating.

But it was fun.  I really had a blast.  It's probably unnatural to enjoy ones own company so much, but I have to be honest.  I did.
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