Monday, March 22, 2010

Rebatching (soap)

My friend, Kathleen, reminded me that you can rebatch soap. I should have researched it a little more before doing it, but I figured it was a already a loss and a little expiramenting wouldn't do any harm. I expected it to turn to liquid when I "melted" it down, but it never did. I later read that that was normal. I finally gave up and, in my impatience, added the olive oil that I had left out when originally batching the soap. I stirred it until I was confident it had chemically reacted with the lye (large amounts of smoky fumes poured out of the pot) and put the lumpy mixture back in the mold.

Today I took it out and cut it. The residual that I washed off of my hands lathered well and didn't melt my hands off, so I figure it must have worked :D Now that it's cut I'm going to let it finish curing (another three weeks) and see how it acts. If all else fails, I can still use it in my homemade laundry detergent recipe. I'm really excited that it's working out afterall!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I remember watching a TV show years ago and a woman ended up killing her boyfriend or something in a vat of lye, and apparently it didn't cure right because she ended up washing herself with the boyfriend soap and her skin all came off. Thanks for reminding me of that. :P LOL!

Tara said...

First of all, I'm not sure what kind of sick, disturbed movies you watch.
Second of all, that's totally unrealistic...when I killed my boyfriend in a vat of lye, the soap cured just fine. :P

Valerie said...

What? No photos of the fumes coming out of the pot? :)
That sort of reminds me of a time when my son had to make a sculputure for school. He decided he was to carve soap so we bough some Ivory and I had the "great" idea that we'd just melt it down and blend all the bars together into one big one so he could carve that. Ivory doesn't melt like I thought it would and it didn't work. That's one reason that I don't try the big things, like making soap from scratch. :)