Salt Bar Soap Again

Okay so I made salt soap again last night.... The results from my slab mold are to the left there. Crockpot hot process attempted pink swirl.

Peppermint EO 1 ounce(equaling 3 TBSP) into about 2#s of the 3# batch of soap. about 30 drops of get this.... Life of the Party liquid coloring red... finally something of Life of the Party that works in hot process soap and not just Melt n Pour.... into the reserve portion for color. Salt went mainly into the non colored portion of the soap with just a bit of salt into the pink section......anyway.... I had a hard time convincing it to be flat on the top. I remembered someone recently saying they had used a spatula dipped in hot water to smooth out their top on a hot process soap. So I tried it......So I used the hand with the playtex glove on it and dipped my hand in the really hot water and attempted to flatten it out. All that did was create white foam across the top. Well my doubts about quick trace (once again) were dispelled by the appearance of the foam. Surely, if it is foaming "it is soap"! The salt is in the white part (about 1# of Mediteranean Fine Sea Salts) The pink portion has the tiniest bit of salt.

Two observations as the strength of the peppermint EO was already noticed in the rebatch on Sunday: firts, the top of the soap (what you see in the picture) had tiny areas of pink wet liquid. When blotted the pink liquid had no odor to it at all, nor did it appear to be oil. You can easily see the difference between oil and water type substances on a papertowel.

Second when I cut on the cutting lines (showing up better this time then the rebatch did on Sunday in my new UPLAND silicone slab mold) when I cross cut it some of the pink fell away from the rest of the pink/white part. I took a picture of this but after I had already downloaded from the camera and uploaded to here this AM and I was out of time for leaving for work.

So now I am at a loss of what to do. I guess I need to find a plain white soap producing recipe that I can just make and make and make and have on hand to rebatch everytime I need to "fix" another batch I've made...... sigh and not of relief. More like sigh of acceptance of flopping soap.

Tried a chunk of the mostly all mixed together pink part that was put into the separate mini mold bar(I cut the soap bar to the left in quarters) this morning and it feels nice and it smells exquisite and it lathers okay, certainly not profusely... but how do you send off partially fell apart soap bars to be swapped.

I want my soap to look like Anhoki's! I want my soap to look like ANYone else's but what I have been getting. Silly me, I sure bit off more than I can chew this time signing up for the swap.

Well that is my story and I'm sticking to it

have a soapy successful day,
denise/deBrat