The next soap I made was a cold processed Blackberry Sage soap on July 27, 2005. This soap had undergone some changes before it reached it's final, ready to be used stage. My ingredients are as follows:

goat's milk
palm oil
palm kernel oil
soybean shortening
coconut oil
shea butter
castor oil
fragrance oil
FDA approved colorant

When I first put this soap together, I added powdered goat's milk at trace. I also tried a swirling technique for the colors, but that proved difficult given the very small mold that I use. The result was a brownish-tan bar (due to the increased heat caused by adding goat's milk) with color only on the top and bottom. Needless to say, it was pretty ugly. The cure weight of this soap was averaged around 3.5 ounces per bar. But I didn't stop there...

After the soap cured, the ugly factor was really bothering me. So I decided to try my hand at hand-milling. Basically, that means that you take your existing, cured soap.... and destroy it. Yep. You grate it down until it all resembles nicely scented grated cheese. In the case of this soap, it resembled ugly, but nicely scented grated cheese.

Here is a picture of both the grated soap and what the bars of soap looked like before grating. See? Ugly.

Then you take the grated soap and stick it in either a microwave, double-boiler, or crockpot (I used a crockpot), add liquid, and melt it down over the course of several hours. I chose to stick with the goat's milk theme and use liquid goat's milk for the melting down process. The color is another matter. My first choice would have been to make a purple batch. But the melted soap had turned a rather ugly putty color and no matter how much dye I added to it, it wasn't turning purple. It turns out that you need a heck of a lot of dye to make any shade of purple. So I stopped there. I didn't want the soap to be dye heavy. So I switched to blue, and the soap took the color straight away. I poured the soap into the mold and let it set up for a day. I was able to unmold the next day but waited a few hours before cutting into bars. The bars were very soft and spongy so I resisted stamping them for another couple of days.

So the end result of this double-processing is a very mild soap that didn't lose any fragrance during the rebatching process. The bars are a blueish/green color and they dried out to approximately 3 ounces each. During the drying phase of a rebatched soap, a LOT of moisture evaporates so the soap winds up looking a little like a dried out sponge. But the resultant soap is really good stuff! This soap is really moisturizing, nourishing, and conditioning. A very gentle soap that foams up blue but doesn't stain your skin.