Teach Soap

I have a craft show scheduled later this spring which is being held at a local winery. I thought it would be cool if I made a soap using wine, so I googled it and saw that a few people had done it. So I chose a Cabernet Sauvignon hoping the red color would stay the same. I boiled the wine to remove some of the alcohol and then froze it into cubes. I decided to use half wine and half water for making the soap. I kept the temps cool because I was afraid the wine would make the soap get too hot. Everything went as planned, but the color turned a medium shade of brown when I mixed the lye solution with the oils. I tried not to panic but I decided to separate some batter from the main batch and mix alkanet root powder in one part, and alkanet root powder and ultramarine blue in another part, then I poured them into my mold in layers. I'm kind of dreading what it's going to come out looking like. It's only been a few hours and I already want to open it up to look at it and poke at it.

So what do you think? Will it be a brown mess, or by some miracle will the color change to beautiful hues of burgundy and purple? Ugh. I think I already know the answer. I should have chosen a white wine.

When I've added wine to the lye, it almost always comes out some shade of brown. So, instead since I want it for the color, I boil the wine down to a syrup and then add it at trace.

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Genny

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~~Heather~~
Mad [soaping] Scientist

Red wine has always gone brown on me, but mead (honey wine) remained a pretty yellow. White wine might work better...

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Lesli Sagan
Avital's Apiaries
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Thought I would follow up with a picture of my ugly wine soap. If I had left it alone it probably wouldn't have come out too bad, the bottom layer is plain and the top layers are with the alkanet root and blue ultramarine, you can't really differentiate the two colored layers. You can see that I wasn't able to thoroughly mix my alkanet root powder and I have spots.

Ugly though it may be, I put a bar in my shower the other day and it is a lovely soap, lots of lather.