3rd time lucky?

So here's a pic of my 3rd soap after pouring. It's:

55% lard
20% olive oil
20% coconut oil
5% castor oil

5% SF

I prepared the lye water then put the oils on to melt - I'm doing this over a Bain Marie, should I just be putting them in the pan on the heat so that they melt quicker? Wondering if my lye water is cooling too much.

I'd added my FO (sugar plum) to my oils whilst they were cooling.

The oils cooled to around 115 before I combined. Quick blasts of the stick blender, stirring in between until they were just combined.

I wanted to do a very simple swirl by taking some of the batter out and adding the colour - mica powder mixed with a little of my melted oil - and then add this to the remaining batter - also coloured the same way. To do the swirl in the pot simple method.

Problem is it just got thick really fast so all I could do was layer it.

Any tips about how to keep it runnier? It just seems to trace quickly, straight to heavy trace from nothing.

Any tips? Or anything I should do differently?

Hi Sonya! That's a very lovely pink!

Regarding heating the oils in a Bain Marie or on direct heat: Speaking only for myself, I heat mine on direct heat in my stainless soaping pot, with my stove burner set halfway between low and medium.

Whose Sugar Plum FO did you soap with, and how much water did you use in your batch (i.e., did you use a 'full water' amount or a water discount)? I ask because I wonder if the FO might be one of the ornery ones that causes acceleration. If so, you can increase your water amount next time, and/or soap cooler. Keep in mind, though, that increasing the water amount and/or lowering the temp doesn't always work every time without fail, but on the bright side, it does work more often than not.

If all else fails, you can always HP when working with a badly behaving FO. I've worked with a couple of real ornery FOs in my time that wouldn't behave in my CP no matter what, but they behaved beautifully when HP'd.

Also, before you buy any FO, I would check out this site: http://soapscentreview.obisoap.ca/ It's a really good resource for checking out FOs before you buy them so that you can weed out any potential trouble-makers. Although not every FO in existence has been reviewed on the site, it's the biggest review site of its kind out there that I know of.


IrishLass

Thanks for the reply. My FO is from a UK company, Soaposh. I used full water (38%).

Wonder if a little more water and being a little more patient waiting for my oils to cool would help.
Thanks for the link too, I will check it out.

Oh and I like the pink too, the other colour is a deeper pink so hope the layers look pretty

Have you made this recipe before?

Soap cooler, with that much lard you should have plenty of time to do swirls. Let your oils cool down to 80* F and always double check if your FO causes acceleration.

No reason to melt your oils quickly, you want to keep the temps down. I use the microwave most of the time but when I do use the stove, I just put the pot directly on the burner on low.

No, this is the first time. I've made similar but the last one didn't have the castor oil, I increased the olive oil as my castor hadn't arrived

Thanks, will try cooler next time

Just a question about the temp to soap at for this recipe as it has coconut oil in (78 degree) would soaping at 80 give me the potential issue of my coconut solidifying again

Not in my experience and I usually soap cool.

You can here how thick the trace was, no chance of swirling this

Looks good though. Looking forward to cut pics.

For the first few tries would just do a solid colour - it's good to get a batch made which is 100% what you were aiming for

Good plan. Gonna go some smaller test batches

Have you heard of the spoon swirl? That may be something you can try if it gets too thick on you again.

Im another newbie to soap making - but from what I have read as long as you combine oils and lye/water mix when they are around the same temperature, that shouldn't be creating any problems. I haven't had any while I've kept to that rule, but I'm only on my 3rd batch as well.

Are you keeping track of what temperature your oils/lye mix are at when adding them together?

Even if it came out thick your soap is looking great though! Goodwork.