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Rosemary soaps
I recently made a CP batch and put dried ground up rosemary in it at trace.
It looked lovely for a while but developed brown spots around the tiny rosemary pieces and made them look much larger and more ugly. I decided to handmill some and found that the brown spots are simply the colour leaching from the rosemary and in the handmilled batch this colour spread evenly through the soap to make it a more even beige colour with smaller pieces of rosemary flecking through the soap.
When I handmilled I took Diane's advice and added a dash of milk (skim in this case). I was pleased with the results.
The top soap is the CP and the bottom is the handmilled.
These moulds were a mackeral tin. It did have a lip which I removed and there are some sticking problems from time to time, but the freezer method usually gets me by when it comes to releasing them, and patience... If I hurry it there are usually problems.
The recipe I used was a variation of The Palm Oil Soap of Norma Coney's, but I used a veg oil blend (that, I was told by the manufacturer, was almost all canola oil) instead of olive... purely for economics at this stage, while I develop my skills.
I ran the fats through the lye calculator at MMS and ended up with this recipe:
27% canola, 22% palm, 51% tallow.
I worked on only 3-4 % excess fat with the lye. It has usually handled well, and this is the only recipe I am using at present to use the oils of course.
For the rosemary soaps I added the dried rosemary and some rosemary fragrance oil, but there is very little fragrance apparent. Maybe once it suds up it will come.
Rebatched rosemary soap
This is one of the 'mouse poo' rosemary soaps that are shown in the above picture.
When I rebatched this lot of the same original rosemary soap that went dark around the rosemary, I melted the grated soap with a little milk in the microwave and added my fat soluble dyes to my fragrance oil once the soap had melted, and poured it into a heart mould.
They smell lovely...
I used a flowershop scent from Auroma on top of the original rosemary fragrance that was very faint.
I like the result, and there are again only tiny specks of rosemary in this
rebatch, again illustrating that the dark blotches dissipate through the soap in a rebatch.
Annette
Contributor: Annette Laskowski [ annettel --at-- ansonic.com.au ]
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