My first beer soap

Just wanted to post a quick pic of my first beer soap/shampoo bar. It'll need to cure for 4 weeks before I can test it out on my hair. I can't wait!!! I'll post the results here.

Monday, Monday......

It's Monday, but a beautiful one at that. It's one of those picture perfect sunny, not a cloud in the sky, days when you're stuck inside an office bldg. the whole day ;-( Woe is me.....

Despite the fact that I must work I am in a rather good mood for a Monday, suprisingly. It could be because I got loads of sleep this past weekend. I stayed up late on Friday and Saturday nights and woke up LATE. The only thing I don't like about waking up real late, 11:30ish for me, is that I feel like half of my day is already gone, ya know? That sucks! But I am rested and that's always good.

I made a few salt bars over a week ago, which seem to be all the rage in our soap making forum and I never posted photos and since I want this blog to be a sort of history of my soaping hobby I'm going to post the pics of my first ever salt bar. Rather than worry about color issues I just colored it with Paprika and it turned out a nice peachy color which I'm happy with. However some parts of the soap are quite crumbly which I'm not happy with but I believe I either waited to long to cut it or I put it in the fridge instead of letting it gel. I'll have to do some more experimenting with this to figure out what went wrong. But all in all the soap came out quite nice for a first try. I'm gonna post the recipe here for anyone who is interested in giving it a go:

Sibi’s Salt Bar

Total oil weight: 2 pounds
Water as percent of oil weight: 38
Super Fat/Discount: 7

Olive oil: 16 ounces
Coconut (76 deg): 8.32 ounces
Shea Butter: 4.48 ounces
Castor Oil: 3.2 ounces

Water: 12.16 ounces
Lye - NaOH: 4.347 ounces

Add 16 ounces of salt to oils (50%). Add lye solution to oils, bring to trace and add approx. 1 Tbsp. honey. Add your favorite fragrance, and color (I used paprika for color but any soap safe coloring can be used) and put in mold. If you let it gel you will need to keep an eye on it and as soon as it gets hard cut it because if you wait too long it will crumble when you cut. Good luck!

What's up?

I've got the hohums cause the weekend just zipped on by. Now I have to drag my behind for 5 days before the next one................bummer.

My first ever soap swap was so much fun I'm gonna have to do it again real soon!! I received some lovely homemade goodies and it felt like a mini-christmas in a box. I will post some of the pics later when I'm at home. Right now I'm at work on a break.

I've been retaining loads of water lately and my Doctor gave me a prescription diuretic which I'll have to say I'v been reluctant to take. You shouldn't take them too often because they can mess up your kidneys and who wants to do that. But the amount of water I'm retaining in my ankles and calves has become ridiculous. Sooooo, I bit the bullet and took a pill Friday evening. OMG - I was going to the ladies room every 10-15 minutes!! My sleep was interupted repeatedly. But you know what? Overnight I lost 8 pounds!!! Imagine that, that's how much excess water I was carrying around, mostly in my feet it seems!!

Gosnopping is doing quite well with traffic. I hope to see it take off real soon. It is such an awesome site that I can't imagine it doing anything but being off the charts successful. It is so visually appealing and the stores on each street are the best out there. I believe that the future of the internet is going in that direction. Keep the audience engaged and the people will come. I'll keep ya posted on future developments with Gosnopping.com. And if you haven't been there, for goodness sakes, go check it out!

I made some more soap the other day and all went well except with the coloring. Golly, I surely need to take a course in "soap coloring 101" or "soap coloring for dummies" cause I'm a total dork when it comes to getting the colors I want. In the pic below all you'll see is a yellow soap. Do you think that was my intention? You'd be wrong. I wanted blue and green.....duh....how the heck did I get yellow???? I've already figured out why but I'm too embarrassed to tell you all so I'll just leave it at that, you'll probably figure it out at some point.



Have a good one everybody! ;-)