October 16, 1998

Well, I stayed home sick from work today -- there's a cold going around the office -- and I took the opportunity to try to save my lavender glop. (I think that's what I'll call it, if it can be saved enough to call it soap..."Lavender Glop Soap"...what the heck, maybe someone will run another ugly soap swap?? :)

What I did was basically try to kind of rebatch it. I started off by dumping the soap-glop back out of the Pyrex glass dishes into the stock pot, which wasn't hard at all since it had barely solidified at all, and it basically plopped right into the pan. I tried melting it down over the lowest heat possible on my stovetop, but even with the flame just about to go out it started to cook the bottom of the soap while the top didn't get any warmth. So after a little while of mistreating my soap like that, I decided to go the oven route. I turned the oven on to its lowest setting, 200 degrees F, and stuck the stock pot in for 10 minute increments, stirring in-between. It took about half an hour to get runny. Then I pulled it out, and added a lye mix I had made with 4 ounces of lye added to 12 ounces of water, stirring slowly at first and then more quickly.

The drawback to stirring runny soap glop is that it splashes! Even with my huge 12-quart stock pot's tall sides, I managed to splash my face. Thank goodness I was wearing my eye protection -- I only barely splashed my mouth and chin, but still -- I'm not eager to find out the effects of raw soap on contact lenses. Needless to say, Sabrina will be a good little home chemist and make sure she is always wearing those goggles! Better dorky than sorry, as I always say.

Anyways, the soap-glop turned into this ugly mess -- which is apparently called the 'vomit stage," and also is apparently normal, just not very publicized -- where it looked like pumpkin pie filling, all grainy and bloppy. After I had everything mixed in, I noticed it was seeping this brownish liquid. The liquid reacted to turn red litmus paper blue (indicating presense of a base), but it also felt oily on my fingertips (and didn't burn) so I'm not sure what it was. I poured the soap-glop into my Saran-wrap lined pyrex dish molds and left them on the back porch (on the ironing board) to cool.

Well....I guess we'll see in a couple days!