Yesterday we combined a cubed blue sandalwood-scented soap with a fresh batch of white soap. We figured the blue chunks on a white background would make a nice contrast. The original soap was supposed to be coconut scented, but it was weak.

Although we’ve been making soap for three years, we never understood how to do color until recently (SoapQueen.com). We always guessed and the soap seldom looked like what we wanted. We put in seven teaspoons of pre-mixed titanium dioxide, but it still didn’t turn out as white as we’d hoped. The recipe calls for three teaspoons per pound of soap, so we should have put in more than twice as much.

I also miscalculated how many molds we’d need, figuring we’d fill our two miter-box molds and have leftover, but it didn’t quite fill the two molds.

We hand-mixed the lye and oils instead of using the stick blender because we didn’t want to accelerate trace, so it took longer to reach trace. We also exchanged five ounces of olive oil from our basic recipe and replaced it with five ounces of castor oil, which is supposed to make a very fine lather.

We put the soap into the two molds and put them in the oven at the lowest temp for an hour, then turned the oven off and left the molds in the oven overnight.

When I came down in the morning I was disappointed to see the soap had turned a light milk-chocolate brown. However, when I cut the first slice, I was delighted to see it had some semblance of what we were hoping for, although it still wasn’t as white as we’d hoped for. I’m thinking we might call it Moody Blues.