Tickled Pink

My daughter was down to her last couple of bars of soap from the last batch I made her.  I had some new fragrance oils, she picked cherry.  Recently, I also decided to add color to my soap, and this is the first batch I’ve used color in.  I’m so excited!  I think it turned out beautifully!  She picked out the pink to go with the cherry scent, but she had her eye on the turquoise blue color I have.  Next batch!

Now I have to wait at least 24 hours before I can unmold these and see how they look.  #anticipation

Filed under: Soap Tagged: Cold Process, Color, Fragrance Oil, Soap

Soapy Clean

I finally got through rendering all that tallow, on Saturday I think.  Boy what a task that was!  I got a lot of tallow – haven’t measured it yet, but somehow I don’t think it was as much as I could have gotten.  I’m still a novice at this and it’s a lot of trial and error.  At least this time it wasn’t nearly as smelly as the last time, whew!  That wet method sure did make a huge difference in that regard. 

Now that the temps have nose-dived into the sub-zero range, I’m not too worried about the bones still in our little storage locker, so I’m making some soap.  As soon as the weather turns warmer, I’ll get back to making that bone broth.  Also not the most fragrant proposition. 

This is from a batch of coconut oil soap I just made for my husband.  He likes that recipe the best – just straight coconut oil. I used a synthetic fragrance oil to scent these, as he’s not a huge fan of the essential oil scents that I have on hand.  So these smell like regular old Ivory bars, but as long as he likes it, I’m happy. 

I made a new recipe for shampoo bars, and those are setting up right now and will be unmolded tomorrow or the next day, and I also want to make another batch of tallow bars.  I can’t believe how much I love the tallow bars.  They make my skin feel so nice! 

I’m debating about using coloring agents in my soap.  I’d like something a little jazzier than plain old ordinary beige, but at the same time, pigments aren’t cheap and they don’t really add anything, you know?  So, I don’t know.  Maybe I’ll try one of the recipes I have for using things like crushed spices or something – paprika is supposed to make a pretty bar.  We’ll see. 

In other news, I was going through the kids’ closet today.  How in the world did my son end up with 6 blue and 5 red shirts?!  Time for some purging!

Cross posts on my daily blog. 

Filed under: Soap Tagged: Soap, Soaping

Making Tallow

A friend of ours brought me some beef fat a couple months ago, so I could make tallow.  I’ve been reading up on how to render it down to a liquid form, and then it’s usable for soaps and balms and things like that.  I’d made a tallow balm before, with some pre-rendered tallow another friend got for me, and that turned out really nice. 

This is how the fat looked when he brought it over.  Kind of gross, huh? 

So I chopped it down into smaller chunks.  Next time, I will run it through my food processor.  I didn’t want to deal with the clean-up this time so I skipped that step, but I think the tallow will turn out better if it’s ground first.

This is how it looked after it was all rendered down.  I had a good quantity of fat so I went about 18 hours all together.  I did some on a low heat on the stove top, and then after my husband got home and I needed the stove to make dinner, I moved my pot to the oven and finished the rendering process there.

Once it cooled, it looked like this.  Pretty, yes?  So far I’ve made a dozen bars of soap with the tallow from one jar, and six smaller jars of balm with a 2nd jar.  With the 3rd, I will make more soap.  It turned out wonderful, and I love how my face feels after I wash with it.  I’ll do a separate post about that. 

And that, my friends, is how I rendered tallow all by myself for the first time ever. 

Have you ever rendered fat before?

Filed under: Tallow Tagged: Rendering, Tallow