The Soap Queen had a really interesting post today about Soap Behaving Badly. I recently had a fun (not) experience with overheating soap. Let's all look at my beautiful soap with lovely very time consuming embeds. Ah, so beautiful. LOL!
So I tried out a new Black Raspberry Vanilla fragrance and everyone (everyone!) said it was the best behaved, most perfect, easy to work with fragrance. Ok then! Let's make a super fancy soap with that untested (by me) fragrance. It started out normally. I did a pretty drop swirl with my fun colored soap batter. It smelled AMAZING. Started putting my embeds on the top and I noticed it was getting pretty firm, very quickly. I was happy that I had gotten my drop swirl done before it firmed up. Ah, what sweet innocent oblivion.
So I wanted to take some pics of this gorgeous soap. I brought my camera into the workshop. Took some pics. La, la, la. Just fiddled around admiring my work.
Now my soaping room is very cold at this time of year. On a good day, it's 65F. On a normal day it's below 60F. This was at night and it was -30F outside, so it was waaay cold in my soaping room.
After the photo shoot I set my little baby soap on a shelf. I didn't insulate it, because I didn't want to mess up the lovely raspberries. I went upstairs, edited pics and uploaded them to FB, because I was so proud of my creation and I wanted to share it with everyone!!
30 mins. later I returned and the soap was overheating! Oily slick on top, cracking in the middle. The raspberries were sinking into the soap like Atlantis into the ocean. HELP! My poor soap!
So I moved the soap loaf down onto the very, very cold cement floor and turned a fan on. I had the fan blowing over the top of it all night. Even with the fan and the cold floor and the cold room - the damage was done. I gave it 3 days, because I was hoping by some miracle that the oil would reabsorb and it would look better. Most of the oil did reabsorb, but it still looked like Frankenstein's uncle.
So one last look at my pretty soap....
I had to rebatch it. All my pretty colors! Sad.
So I chopped it up and put it in the crockpot. Melted it down, beat the ugly out of it and remolded it.
I don't think it looks too bad. It still smells amazing. I put a little gold dust on the top, because gold dust makes every thing look better.
Of course, now I am terrified to use the fragrance again. It might not have been the fragrance's fault. Maybe I put too many raspberries on top and this insulated the heat too much. I have to try it again, but I might wait a little bit. I have to regain my courage!
