Rooibos Vanilla Soap

Rooibos Vanilla

Today I made some new soap.  This soap will be a part of my regular line of soap.  I have been trying to get this soap made for a while now, but I just haven't had enough money for materials.

I started by putting 5 tea bags in a jar with around 10 ounces of hot water to steep for tea.  Once my tea had steeped I added the remainder of liquid for my recipe in ice and water.  Next I measured out my lye and added it to the tea mixture.  As usual it was a little smelly, but the smell settled out pretty quickly.

Not super defined, but I like the swirls anyway 

After my lye water was ready and cooling, I started measuring out my oils.  Since I was coloring with oils I reserved out equal amounts of madder infused olive oil and plain olive oil.  I split the soap in half for coloring so it would not be a problem to add the oils separately.  Since I have had to start storing everything for my soap in the shed this has gotten a little more difficult.  For starters I ended up having to make three trips out to the shed for more oils because I had emptied the bottles in the house.  It has been interesting to see the effect of the cold on the different oils.  But I will go into all of this in a different post.

After warming up the oils enough to scoop or squeeze them into the bowl for weighting, I had to get all of the chunks blended out so that the lye would melt the oils evenly.  Let me just say that coconut oil gets VERY hard in the cold.  I also added about 2 tsp of Vanilla Bean fragrance oil from Brambleberry to my oils at this point.  This is somewhat to make sure that I don't forget too add it later.  After I got everything all smoothed out to my satisfaction, I added the lye water to my oils.  I started blending the mixture with my stick blender until I reached a light trace.  Once I had reached light trace, I split the batch in two equal parts and added the oils to each part.  To the white half I also added about 2 teaspoons of titanium dioxide mixed with about 2 tablespoons of water.  After I had my additions added, I used the stick blender to get my additions incorporated into the batch portions.

The top is mostly a creamy white right now, but there
are a few swirls of the pinky color

Once my colors were sufficiently incorporated I stopped blending.  I had already taken it a little too thick.  Because the soap was so thick it didn't behave like I had hoped it would when I poured the color  into the white.  After I finished with my usual sample mold, I started pouring into my mold.  It turned out that most of the white was on top.  I used a skewer to mix the color portion up into the white.  I ended up with less definition that I had hoped for, but it is still a very nice looking soap.

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