Wooooooo what a busy few months! Non-soap related events were all go through May and June so I maaaayyyybe got a little bit behind with soap making. It means that the August soaps might not quite be ready by the beginning of the month, but fingers crossed.
My last update was about the shrink wrap I use being discontinued - I have found a replacement! It's not biodegradable, but it is recyclable with your usual soft plastics. I'll keep using the bioshrink until I've run out, but I'll make sure the product descriptions tell you which ones you have.
I've experimented a bit with adding sodium lactate to my batches. Sodium lactate is a liquid salt that helps the soap to harden more quickly so that I can get them out of the mould sooner. Before, it was taking a full week before I could get the soaps out of the mould because they were too soft. Adding the sodium lactate cut that down to one to four days. The amount that I added to get the one day did make the soap crack a tiny bit on the ends and had a lot of soda ash (which is just a cosmetic issue, it doesn't affect the soap at all) so... not the correct solution.
The wonderful In My Soap Pot has been making DIY soap kits for a while but she has decided to stop sending out the sets with pre-measured ingredients. I'd only heard about these earlier this year but when I heard it was the last one I had to go for it. So prepare yourselves for a brand new technique coming out with one of the summer collections. BUT upon reading through the instructions, I saw that she oven processes her soaps (which I'd heard about briefly but only knew that you could use it to make your soap go through gel phase... a story for another day). Turns out it hardens your soap enough to get it out of the mould the next day *insert confetti cannons*. It makes cutting the soap a little harder, so I have to make sure I get the soap out and cut it that day, not leave it on the shelf.
So, winning! No more worrying that I need to add another hard oil (even though I can get RSPO palm oil, I'd rather not use it anyway), or waiting a full week before I can make another soap. And I've made and cut both of the October soaps in the past week and am ready to start on my Christmas collection for the November release. Yup, soapmakers are starting to think about Christmas already.
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