Cucumber Fug

So. I haven't posted since Friday, because I'm up to my garters in gators, here, trying to get ready for Christmas and making sure I've got plenty of stock. For the past couple of weekends, that has meant salt bars.

I had most of them made already. I thought today, to finish off the restocks, I'd add some Cucumber Mint. I have just enough Cucumber to blend for this batch, so I'm off to the races. I measure everything, melt the oils, dissolve the lye, line the molds, and weigh out the salt. Notice that I forgot to pull the colorant and prep it.

Cucumber Mint salt bars are aqua, with a slight green swirl. I put a swirl in because I'm a smartass. Salt bars tend to get thick quickly, and a swirl isn't the easiest thing to do, so I wanted to show off. This is always a bad sign.

I mix everything, and it's looking fine, except that I realize I didn't get the green ready, so I stop and do that. Back to my soap bucket - huh, starting to thicken. Oops, better grab the aqua.

I normally mix the aqua myself. But I'm in a hurry, and I have some premixed colors that I use for bath bombs. There's the bottle of bright blue - I grab it and dump some into the pot. Oddly, it looks a bit gray, so I add some of the green I have ready for the swirl. Still a strange color. I add more blue, but it doesn't seem to help much.

Then I realize that I have two bottles of bright blue. One of them turns pink in soap because of the pH changes. I'm pretty sure I grabbed the wrong one. So I grab the right one, and frantically add a bunch of that. My soap is getting way to thick to stir, so I add some water. Now it has lumpy parts, runny parts, pink parts, blue parts, greenish parts, and a lot of nasty gray parts.

I stir it all together - don't arm wrestle me, you'll lose - and cram it into the mold. I actually get a somewhat green swirl. It isn't level, so I slam the mold onto the counter several times, scaring the daylights out of the poor dog. It looks reasonable, so I slap it into the oven, where it is now lurking.

Colors change during the gel phase, and I won't know what this looks like until I get it sliced. I'm betting it's going to be clown puke. I'll let you know later.