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Sounds like delicious soap! With the oatmeal, it depends on what you are wanting it to do. Colloidal oatmeal is regular oats, but ground REALLY fine so it forms a milky suspension in water, so you can soak in it without all the goodness making a gloopy mess at the bottom of the bath. Colloidal...

I use fresh frozen goats milk for 100% of my liquid. I make this soap for myself and a few family members with excema, so we want as much goaty goodness as we can get. My official superfat is 5% but of course with the fat in the milk it's really going to be higher. The lather is slightly less...

Was it sold as an edible oil? Is it green and smelly? Canola is a specific cultivar of rapeseed, and the two terms are sometimes swapped around, so you may actually have canola under the older, more generic, name.

Oh dear! Hope your feet are ok. Was it just oil or had you mixed the beer/lye in?

I second the acid-rinse idea! I use a very simple soap for my hair, goats milk and oatmeal with olive, coconut, and castor oils. I have waist-length fine-but-thick blonde hair that tends to get oily on top and dry at the ends. I only lather the hair right up near my scalp, the ends don't need...

Thanks for the advice. Yep, a book would probably be good, I think I am just so used to looking stuff up online :lol: Will forward your book suggestions to the inlaws! :D And maybe ask for some essential oils too. I already have the basics... safety gear, stick blender, etc... and I can buy...

Just a thought cos I'm a total newbie but have you tried not letting it gel? My first honey-goatsmilk-oats batch gelled and I think the caramelised sugars and oats did have a baking kind of smell... well once the ammonia smell of the milk wore off :lol: The next batch I put in a shallow metal...

My birthday is coming up and MIL & FIL have offered to buy some soap-making books for me. I'm a soaping newbie, vegetarian, more interested in using natural colours/fragrances (if any) than artificial stuff, and I think at some stage I'd like to try liquid soaps too... I've looked at 'the...

Thanks for the advice, I will give the water discount a go. Especially since I like my olive oil :) Does lavender oil accelerate trace? Now to find some pipe...

... any correlation? As I understand it (could be wrong!) the saponification reaction is basically complete within a couple of days for cold process, and a lot of what goes on in the rest of the cure time is getting rid of excess moisture. So would thinner/smaller bars (higher surface...

Yeah thanks, I have used natural colourings before for other stuff... but even natural things can be skin irritants. Just trying to keep things as simple as possible at the moment!

Thanks Judy! I'm pretty happy with how they turned out too. I haven't ventured into colours and fragrances (partly cos they're expensive, partly cos my skin is so sensitive) so I'm glad these came out a pretty colour. And yeah, I definitely could have left them in a bit longer, but I was...

Thank you everyone! I took it out of its tray this morning and cut a few pieces... [attachment=0:1hv9jb98]goaty-oaty shea.jpg[/attachment:1hv9jb98] It is still quite soft and a bit cakey. I guess with the olive oil it will take a while to harden, and I think the oatmeal makes the cut a bit...

Thanks for that, that makes me feel a bit more hopeful! It seems to be setting fairly quickly... already quite firm, and no separation visible at this point (its uncovered in a shallow tray cos I don't want it to gel). It isn't getting as warm as my earlier batches but we also have cooler...

Hi all, I'm a newbie CP soaper on the east coast of Australia. I'm wondering if there is a way to tell false trace from true trace as you are stirring, or as the soap is setting up. I have just made my 6th batch, my 3rd batch with goats milk. My recipe was 50% olive oil, 15% castor, 15% coconut...