Spring Soaping Surprise!

Today I started my spring soaping. With all the good intentions in tow, I headed out to the shop to take a gander at my inventory of floral fragrance oils. They ranged from clean ozone scents like Aloe Vera, Blue Chamomile and Green Clover to more the heady florals like Gardenia, Jasmine, and Hawaiian White Ginger.


Living in the Spokane area, I thought that I would chose Antique Lilac in preparation for our annual Lilac Festival. Also because it is one of the first flowers to bloom in this area. So I set about my usual soapmaking process. I made sure to let all my oils cool due to the fact that I was working with a floral fragrance oil. Florals tend to cause the rest of the oils to seize up if temps are too warm.

After doing some office work while my oils cooled, I went back to work mixing everything together and adding some purple color to a small amount of soap for swirling. Well, there was no time for that!! Within a matter of just a few minutes, maybe 3 minutes tops. Just long enough for me to get the purple mixed in with a spoon, everything started to sieze up!!

Needless to say, this batch got glopped and smooshed into the mold instead of poured. It is in the oven in the shop at a very low temp at the moment in the hopes that it will warm enough to relax down into the mold leaving no air pockets.

Soaping is always an adventure, lol!

Reporting back with pictures of the "Seized Surprise"

This is the left half of the 5 lbs mold. You can see on the top how uneven it looks. Those were individual seized pieces that I tried to mash back down into the rest of the soap.



Here are some of the bars after cutting. As you can see they are riddled with pockets and crevasses. Some bars had holes in the middle.








And here are a few bars that didn't look too bad. However, there were only about 5 bars out of 23 that looked like this. That lovely purple shade was supposed to be delicate wispy swirls. Instead it ended up glopped and smashed into the rest of soap batch, resulting in ...... well, glops of purple color.

Suffice to say, this batch after cure will end up going through the shredder to be made into another bath. See, not all is a lost when it comes to soapmaking. It can almost always go back in the pot.