Going green again

Here's yet another soap colored with wheatgrass as I couldn't get enough of it in the castile soap, which by the way has still not set. Wheatgrass imparts a very elegant green to soap and me loves a green soap. So here I combined tea tree and mint essential oils to help a pimply teenager (my cousin). She wanted to see how soap is made and we had a blast that evening with a lot of weighing, stirring and giggling. The partly liquid coconut oil refused to come out of the bottle with a micro mini opening and we both had to squeeze it out with all our might. And when the stubborn thing actually came out, it was all over my clothes.
Here's a tip I found on the internet: rub shampoo into the oil stain without wetting the cloth and then put it in the washing machine with other laundry. Worked like magic. :)

Brown and green layers 

The brown swirls on top didn't work out like how
I wanted and since it was a very small batch,
a lot of air bubbles got whipped in

Coffee beans on top was my cousin's idea

Have a great bubbly week!!

Experimenting continues

The experimenting continues with so many things all around, just waiting to get into that soap pot. This time around it is for that light pink color.

Take 1:

How's that for a light pink?? Yuck!

Take 2:

A little too light, but I can live with this :)

I used Kumkum to color these. 

Kumkum is the red powder applied to the forehead by women in India, made by mixing turmeric or saffron with slaked lime.

I have been having serious shelf-life issues here. So this is also an experiment with wheatgerm oil. The first batch was made without and the second one with wheatgerm oil. I also ditched the olive oil for sunflower oil. Kept reading that olive oil could be the culprit, although I don't think substituting with sunflower oil was too wise, considering it's already short shelf-life. Will wait and watch. 

Happy soaping there!!

Three soaps with one stone...err mould!!

People have already hit two birds with one stone, so that would be boring to try again. Plus why would I want to hit a bird??

All the pent up soaping energy had to put somewhere, so many ideas swirling in my head and many more scribbled into many books. If I had to try one new idea at a time, I would be dead long before all the ideas get exhausted (exaggerating here). And what happens to all the new ones that keep popping up all the time?? So I decided to put three new ideas into one cauldron.

- Wheatgrass powder to get that green
- Room temperature method
- In the pot swirl

The stone was thrown right back at me. Ouch!! I could hardly seen any swirls, so decided to mix the whole thing up to get a homogeneous extremely light, barely there green (almost cream) color. A castile soap that refused to harden after more than 24 hours. No gel due to the room temperature method. Did I forget anything else...ah yes, some oils were slowly seeping out. I wanted to wait it out and see what happens. Patience is a virtue, which is definitely not mine. So.....

I threw the whole thing into a big pot and set it on fire. Not really! I hot processed it and added some more wheatgrass with a little water for a darker green. The beautiful scent of Mint and Tea tree was replaced with a grass smell. Yuck!! But luckily it sobered down and the nice scent surfaced out again. The soap is still resting in the moulds. I might have to leave it there for a couple of days.

Let me share some before and after pics:

Not much of a color contrast there,
so I stirred the whole thing up. It turned
a lighter green the next morning.

Post HP with added wheatgrass. Still very gooey to
unmould.

Patience is definitely not my virtue but 'repentance in hindsight' for sure is!! All the joys of soap making!!
Will share pictures of cut soap as soon as it sets up...maybe in a year or two. LOL!!

Hanging up those invisible shoes

I finally hung up those invisible shoes that kept creeping onto my feet so often. Here I am back in India, in the city where I was born, grew up, went to college and got married. It feels great to be back after leaving this lovely city almost 9 years ago, right after I got married.

The past month was exciting and chaotic and I barely had enough time to breathe. After our tenants moved out, the house had to be painted and cleaned and furnished, well partly-furnished...I still have a ton of things to buy. I hated and loved every minute of the past month though. Hated that I had to get all the things done by myself in the fantastic heat and humidity, but loved laboring to get the house my husband and I so dearly dreamt of, in order.

Now that I have time to breathe and a little more to spare, things are going to get soapy again. :)

Before going back to Austria in January I made a couple of batches of soap so they would be cured and ready to greet me on my return to India. I tried my hand at the spoon swirl and let's just leave it at that. The color contrasts were very subtle, almost too subtle to notice any swirls. Plus I just wanted to finish using up the Lemon-Eucalyptus EO.

Another one was a coffee soap, made with brewed filter coffee. I love the scent and surprisingly after 3 months of curing it still smells like coffee. Maybe it is due to the 20-30% chicory added to the coffee beans in India. The soaps got generously showered with coffee beans for decoration, which have been falling off with every fondle.

Some of these coffee soaps I gave as Mother's Day gifts to my aunts and a cousin, all wonderful mothers who spend so many hours in the kitchen.

I leave you with a picture and promise to be back soon with more soap pictures of new creations.

Please don't notice the ribbon edges...again no time to breath
applies plus couldn't locate the scissors.

Soda ash on the top.... not too bad.
Missing coffee beans....no comments!! :D

Jugaad

If you are a north Indian I won't have to explain what it the title means, but for the rest of us (I hail from south India) this is what my husband had to say when I asked him what it means (I'm not going to give it out right away...I need to build up the excitement).

As soon as I got married I moved to Gurgaon, a city very close to New Delhi and Hindi is the spoken language there. Luckily we studied it in school and even though my Hindi was very broken with a strong south Indian accent, I could follow conversations. At this point of time I would like to thank the Bollywood industry whose films I watched over the years and learnt more Hindi from here than at school. Now who wouldn't like to watch some lovey-dovey scenes and peppy dance numbers instead of learning sentence formation. Grammar is for dummies anyways!! :D

So I kept hearing this term 'jugaad' almost everywhere I went. 'We cannot find a part for this vehicle...no problem we can do some 'jugaad' 'is what the mechanic would say. Some days back this word was floating in my mind while still in bed, so first thing after waking up I asked my husband (who spent most of his childhood in north India and speaks Hindi better than his mother tongue Telugu) what would the English word for jugaad be. While he pondered, I asked if it meant creativity. He said, it could mean creativity, but also something more.

Just found out there is a whole Wikipedia page for this word. There is also a vehicle called 'Jugaad'!! :) I saw it a couple of times around some rural areas, but never got a ride in it. So basically my post is a waste??? Hey wait!! I will show you how I did jugaad! :P

You know the whole pledge I took about not making soap till I get back to India because of weight issues (not mine, but the soaps that have to be carried back in my bags). But soon enough the soap itch was getting too much to bear. So I scratched some internet pages to see if soap bars could be converted to liquid soap....Hallelujah they could be!! Some of my very first batch of goat's milk soaps were lying in the cupboard and had lost almost all the scent, so I scraped them up and added them to just about steaming distilled water, like the recipe said. I don't know where I found the recipe...just google it if you want to try. 

The old Goat's milk bar. I added 3 bars, about 200 gms
to about 7 tea cups of water. The recipe wasn't strict about the water

Soap shaving...I am craving something caramel right now

Into the pot of hot water

I stirred in a little bit of pumpkin seed oil (the recipe said you could add any oil for some moisturizing). In the end after the solution cooled down in went about 10 ml of Lemon essential oil.

I think it's ready

After some time, two layers...separation??
I don't know.
I just shook the heck out of it till it mixed again.
;)

Well the soap solution is quite nice. We have been using it for a few days now and it isn't drying out my skin like the store bought liquid handwash. This is how I tackled the no soaping situation.

Jugaad, according to Wikipedia is an innovative fix or a work-around a problem. Many solutions to everyday problems lie in this widely used concept in India.

Do share your jugaad stories...would love to read them!!

I'm off to jugaad something for lunch! ;)