Making Soap

I'm ridiculously tired. I went to bed a wee bit too late last night, and woke up far too early. I get so into my business sometimes that I can't stop. Sometimes, I wake up in the night and just do research, or recalculate budgets and finance junk, or brainstorm ideas. It's fun to have a business and do what you love, but I just love it so much, that I have a hard time differentiating between "work" and "not work". Thank God I'm not married, as my husband would probably be neglected, hate me, and say that I've given new meaning to the term "workaholic".
As I've only just begun making soap, it's quite apparent that I'm still learning. And there is SO much to learn. To be honest, I'm still learning about the whole process in general, but more specifically, rebatching.
Yesterday's batch didn't go so well. The soap came out great, mind you. It's soap. It just didn't come out the way I was hoping. I attempted to do some swirling techniques and it didn't work out so well, heh. In addition, I must have added the fragrance in a wee bit earlier than I was supposed to, because it has barely any scent at all (and I added A LOT of fragrance oil). I was rather disappointed in that. I don't know much about rebatching-aka-milling, but I'm going to attempt it with this batch. I might wait a week or two, for it to fully harden first.

Here is the soap, just after trace, when you first begin to cook it. Is has a consistency somewhat like pudding:

It then begins to thicken, have a grainy look, which, personally, reminds me of applesauce:

When it gets thick enough, like a vasaline consistency, it's ready to be added to the molds:

It has to sit in the molds for a few hours before you can take it out, and cut it into bars. I've found that even after that, the bars are still really soft, and I find they fully harden after a couple weeks.


Today I'll be working on rebatching, body whips, etc. and most likely just working on my shop. I'll be updating later today, though, as I missed yesterday!