More Soap - with Fragrance

We decided to make a batch of soap; we're using the very last cake from the November 4 batch and I wanted to try a batch with fragrance. I had been thinking sandalwood but was STRONGLY overruled at the health food shop when Meg spied a bottle of lemongrass drops. So lemongrass it was. We also stuck a lavender flower head into one of the rectangle ones. That should be interesting!

Here you can see the caustic soda and water cooling in the pyrex jug. It gets very hot.

The olive oil and copha warming up.

Combining the two mixtures (caustic soda/water and olive oil/copha) - mixing - trying to arrive at trace. This is when we added the fragrance. It took another couple of minutes compared to last time and I stopped when it was still a little runny, not too thick.

We made a loofah soap!

Pouring the soap into the moulds; much easier than last time - it flowed smoothly.

In the moulds and ready to wrap in towels. This mixture is a totally different colour to last time - this is yellow; last batch was white. The only difference was the brand of oil I used.

There's not much to show for it but we also made 10 litres of washing liquid (for clothes). This pic shows bringing the mixture to the boil and the bottles of water waiting to be added.

It was a very productive weekend.