Don’t you hate when you have one of those days where everything goes wrong and there isn’t even a happy accident to make it worthwhile? Lol. My day was I Love Lucy worthy when I tried to make some product. *rolling eyes*
First, my foot has been really bothering me, so I tried to do some of the prep work while sitting, and when I cut some of the glycerin soap base I almost sent it flying across the kitchen. I ripped a hole in the wax paper, nearly dumped my FO and vanilla stabilizer mixture, and almost overflowed my measuring cup.
It has to get better, right? Nope. *laugh* I have a sample of Matte Burgundy pigment, which looked like the perfect red for Red Velvet Cake Soap, so I mixed the powder into some glycerin and it looked gorgeous. Added it to the soap and it turned lavender. Huh?! So I added more thinking it was so light that it wasn’t showing the real color and it just became an even richer shade of lavender. It was pretty, but not when representing a cake. lol. Added some yellow to bring out a muddy tone, but fourteen drops of yellow didn’t change it a bit. Holy smokes! I don’t think I’ve ever added that many drops of dye to a soap before and here I was adding it on top of a whole milliliter’s worth of burgundy dye! Somewhere around 8 drops of brown oxide made it a little darker, but not a big change. Finally I cut some slices from my strong and deep Americana Red color bar (which is basically a chunk of super strongly colored soap that you usually shave a tiny bit off of to color your soap) and finally after four small chunks of Americana the soap actually turned an acceptable reddish brown. *cracking up* I literally lost track of how much dye went into this soap and have no way to accurately figure up the cost, let alone recreate this color. I started to pour the first halves of the soap slices (I’m going to put a “filling” between layers and then pipe “frosting” on top) and my hand decided to do its own thing, and I poured soap down the side of one of the mold cavities. A little hard to have layers when there’s a smear of soap down the side, so I tried to clean it off. Buh me. It’s a silicone mold, so of course the cavity moved around when I tried to scrape the upper side, which resulted in me totally wrinkling up that slice of soap. *shaking head* I got disgruntled about that and then it suddenly dawned on me that I can’t duplicate this color, so I can’t do a second pour to finish these after pouring the filling layer. I’ll have to use half of the other first pours to make layers now. Dude, seriously?! Fine. I set the mold aside and I’ll deal with them some time after they set. Maybe my luck will improve by then.
Since things weren’t going so well I figured I’d switch to an easy peasy pour. Just add some stabilized Buttercream FO to white glycerin base, and pour some ornament soaps to hand paint later. They turned peach for some reason. I’m not joking. I expected a little discoloration from the vanilla, but I’ve never had it become so noticeable. My mom was here helping so I asked her if it was too weird to use for ornaments, but she assured me they would be pretty with this color. I then overpoured one cavity so bad it went all over my stove top. Lol. I still have no idea how either. One moment it didn’t have enough to fill the top of the cavity and quicker than the blink of an eye I had soap pouring over the side of the mold. I wasted probably one whole soap’s worth.
I figured I’d try one more batch of soap that can’t go wrong (at least to my knowledge so far). Mechanic’s Soap. I pulled up soap recipes on my laptop and I couldn’t find over half of the soap recipes. I checked Overdrive and they’re not there either. Biscuits and gravy!! (Apparently a bunch of files were on a flash drive for me to transfer from the desktop to my laptop, but with my lovely memory issues I had managed to forget this key bit of information. This has since been remedied. *grin*) I pulled up the mechanic scrub which has some of the same ingredients, to refresh my memory, and after seeing apricot seeds and ground flax in the scrub recipe I started doubting that I’d get the soap version right, so I decided to go ahead and make the scrub, since I needed some anyway and actually had the recipe. Lo and behold I don’t have any pumice. *cracking up* I had put a note to myself in my grocery app to order more when I next ordered from my wholesaler, but I’ve been really well behaved and haven’t ordered from them in a long time, so I never got it and hadn’t seen that reminder for a long time. After sounding like Muttley from the Dastardly and Muttley cartoons I scrapped that and decided to try to save the work session, since it was one of the few times I had help, and decided to make some Sleepy Time and Monsters Away sprays.
In those missing files were the recipes for those sprays, but hey, no big deal. I know the scents that go into at least one, so I thought all was good. However, the spray base is a concentrated formula that has to be reconstituted, and I couldn’t remember the ratio. I got on the wholesaler’s website to find out that it was discontinued and they had removed the product directions, of course. I was about in tears at this point. *laugh* After some searching I found my binder of printouts from the wholesaler’s site of the MSDS files, which also included instructions. I finally found the sheet for the multispray base thankfully, but at that point I was so discombobulated that I knew I wouldn’t get the recipes right, and plus I was having a debate over should I even make more product to sell when I probably can’t recreate them later if they sell out. (After I sat for awhile I decided that I still will, but more about that later.)
I decided to move on to some bubble washes. Mom was here to help, so I figured I’d put her at the stove heating the base, to keep me from starting a fire somehow or something, with this streak I was having. Then I discovered that I only had a few ounces of base left. Mom and I talked it over and decided we would try to go to the store in Topeka in a few days (one of the few ingredients I can get in this state instead of online), and I figured I’d check their price on their website before I could forget, so we could figure up how many to get/how much I could afford. It too was discontinued. *shaking head* Wrap it up, no more filming today Folks. *laugh*
After Mom left and I finished putting ingredients and equipment away I did some research on my wholesaler’s site. Thankfully they have an all purpose body spray base that is also safe on linens, so it’ll replace the discontinued multipurpose spray, which makes me confident that I should be able to keep making my kid sprays. I also found a well rated bubble wash base that will hopefully be as good as the one I (and customers) have loved. I also ordered the low supplies and got a free sample of black glitter. Finally something went right. *grin*
It helped my mood to discover that the soap cake slices have turned out a usable color and Larry has a four day “weekend”, so hopefully he can use that steady hand of his to cut off the edges that bled on several of the ornament soaps. See, I think that although the cake soaps are more of a brownie batter color than Red Velvet, that it’ll work. Just might be a “Chocolate Layer Cake Soap Slice” instead. *laugh*
Since I’m not truly convinced that my luck has changed, I don’t trust myself with an Xacto knife and will leave that to Larry. *cracking up* I don’t want to try to host Thanksgiving with a cast or stitches. So I’ve decided to let the fire burn out in the woodstove early in order to avoid burns or catching the carpet (or my hair) on fire and I’m just going to re watch some Quack Pack on DWTS. *grin* It’s probably safer for everyone if I just recline with Bo and watch Sadie. Redneck pride, baby!
I hope my misadventures in crafting has lifted some spirits and that you have some awesome luck this fine Tuesday. I think I’ll just wait until afternoon to test my luck again, so maybe I’ll sleep in really late. 😉
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