the final cut... (of batch number 1!)

The waiting is over... well the first part at least... 

After 48 hours, the soap was finally ready to be cut. Normally on a friday night I am mostly looking forward to relaxing after a hard week's work with a glass of wine or a gin and tonic (perhaps both!), but tonight I couldn't wait to see how the soap turned out! Luckily the wooden mould that I bought from ebay is easy to dismantle making soap removal very easy and I had also lined my mould with polythene which peeled off the soap block without any problems.

The mould is 26cm long and initially I had though I would cut it into 8 bars, each of ~3cm wide. However, after cutting the first bar, I felt this was actually a little too thick, so cut the rest at a slightly smaller 2.5cm width.  This will give me 10 good sized bars in future if I cut them all at this size.  I used a normal kitchen knife for cutting which cut through the soap very easily and left a nice smooth surface on the cut faces.  

I weighed each bar and the ones which were ~2.5cm wide were all very similar in weight - between 100 to 120g.  I think they will be a little lighter after the curing process but that is to be expected. It is hard to tell from the pictures, but the soap is a light white/cream colour which looks to be even throughout all of the bars.  There are no holes or anything in the soap so presumably there were not air bubbles in there when it was poured.  Now all that remains is to leave it (again!) to cure for 4 weeks or so.  I have placed all the bars in a cardboard shoe box where they are sat on top of greaseproof paper.

I might need something a little bigger but this will do for now!  Since this is my first ever soap batch, I was desperate to try a bit to see if it lathers.  Rather than waste a good bar, I picked up a tiny bit of soap which had been stuck to the plastic and tested it.... much to my relief and amazement, it acted just like normal soap!  Honestly, I was expecting this whole trial to be a disaster and fail, so you can imagine my excitement to see the product working!  Fingers crossed, so no I can  happily wait for the curing process to finish.

I genuinely can't believe that I have successfully completed my first batch of soap and it worked!  I have a wonderful feeling of accomplishment, however I am already thinking about what I can try next!  I found myself today once again browsing some soap sites and blogs on my lunch break, and came across another (simple! ha!) recipe which only contains olive oil, coconut oil, coconut milk and lye....

I want to also start adding colour though.... oh what to do!?!?