What soapy thing have you done today?

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Today I cut two soaps.

1) Beer soap #2 - I got some air bubbles in the top layer but I’ll just pretend I did that on purpose to look like foam. :D I lightened the top with satin white mica so I don’t know how if the vanillin will overtake it or not. We shall see. I'm hoping that this batch comes out okay. I used my favorite milk stout for the beer. I'm not very good at swirling yet - I just did a chopstick swirl.

2) Made my basic recipe with lard. First time I’ve soaped with lard. I think this will be my swirling recipe! I now have my tests of basic recipe w/palm, basic recipe w/tallow, and basic recipe with lard all curing so I can compare them side by side. Maybe I should do one with both lard and tallow just to be thorough.

I tried to do a ghost swirl. Another chopstick swirl. You can sort of see it, but the higher water portion got kind of bubbly looking - probably got too hot? You can totally tell by looking at the tops which part was water discounted. It is smoother and creamy. The other looks a bit buggly. :( I had a hard time managing the temperature during the gel. I'm not entirely sure the discounted portion didn't gel a bit. I still think it looks pretty and it was just for funsies. I’m going to try it again at some point. I’m really loving all white soaps.
And, I meant to congratulate you on these great soaps when I was here earlier. My mom would take us for root beer floats as a treat when we were kids. Your root beer soap looks good enough to drink :). The other one is pretty.
 
Dawni & Mobjack Bay - thank you both for the compliments! I used more of the rice water/milk in the white soap and I STILL have a ton of it left. I froze it in small containers. I'll be making rice soaps for a while lol. The ghost swirl technique intrigues me and I want to try it some more and see if I can do a better job. I need to get a heating pad I think - my oven gets too hot on the lowest setting.
 
Today I cut two soaps.

1) Beer soap #2 - I got some air bubbles in the top layer but I’ll just pretend I did that on purpose to look like foam. :D I lightened the top with satin white mica so I don’t know how if the vanillin will overtake it or not. We shall see. I'm hoping that this batch comes out okay. I used my favorite milk stout for the beer. I'm not very good at swirling yet - I just did a chopstick swirl.

2) Made my basic recipe with lard. First time I’ve soaped with lard. I think this will be my swirling recipe! I now have my tests of basic recipe w/palm, basic recipe w/tallow, and basic recipe with lard all curing so I can compare them side by side. Maybe I should do one with both lard and tallow just to be thorough.

I tried to do a ghost swirl. Another chopstick swirl. You can sort of see it, but the higher water portion got kind of bubbly looking - probably got too hot? You can totally tell by looking at the tops which part was water discounted. It is smoother and creamy. The other looks a bit buggly. :( I had a hard time managing the temperature during the gel. I'm not entirely sure the discounted portion didn't gel a bit. I still think it looks pretty and it was just for funsies. I’m going to try it again at some point. I’m really loving all white soaps.
LOVE that first soap...the swirl is awesome and I think that "foam" is spot on...even if it wasn't planned.
:dance:
 
1) Beer soap #2 - I got some air bubbles in the top layer but I’ll just pretend I did that on purpose to look like foam. :D I lightened the top with satin white mica so I don’t know how if the vanillin will overtake it or not. We shall see. I'm hoping that this batch comes out okay. I used my favorite milk stout for the beer. I'm not very good at swirling yet - I just did a chopstick swirl.

2) Made my basic recipe with lard. First time I’ve soaped with lard. I think this will be my swirling recipe! I now have my tests of basic recipe w/palm, basic recipe w/tallow, and basic recipe with lard all curing so I can compare them side by side. Maybe I should do one with both lard and tallow just to be thorough.

I tried to do a ghost swirl. Another chopstick swirl. You can sort of see it, but the higher water portion got kind of bubbly looking - probably got too hot? You can totally tell by looking at the tops which part was water discounted. It is smoother and creamy. The other looks a bit buggly. :( I had a hard time managing the temperature during the gel. I'm not entirely sure the discounted portion didn't gel a bit. I still think it looks pretty and it was just for funsies. I’m going to try it again at some point. I’m really loving all white soaps.[/QUOTE]

love your beer soap!!! I think you will like the lard--if you try tallow let us know the differences in soaping with lard and tallow

cut my dandelion soap--very pretty light yellow and the smell is great--now need to wait a few days to try one of the ends
 
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Sat FM was ok and about normal, but it is FREE and I have a few followers there that will buy a bar even if they don't need it. I had not been there the week before and I try to go every other week.
 
Today I cut two soaps.

1) Beer soap #2 - I got some air bubbles in the top layer but I’ll just pretend I did that on purpose to look like foam. :D I lightened the top with satin white mica so I don’t know how if the vanillin will overtake it or not. We shall see. I'm hoping that this batch comes out okay. I used my favorite milk stout for the beer. I'm not very good at swirling yet - I just did a chopstick swirl.

2) Made my basic recipe with lard. First time I’ve soaped with lard. I think this will be my swirling recipe! I now have my tests of basic recipe w/palm, basic recipe w/tallow, and basic recipe with lard all curing so I can compare them side by side. Maybe I should do one with both lard and tallow just to be thorough.

I tried to do a ghost swirl. Another chopstick swirl. You can sort of see it, but the higher water portion got kind of bubbly looking - probably got too hot? You can totally tell by looking at the tops which part was water discounted. It is smoother and creamy. The other looks a bit buggly. :( I had a hard time managing the temperature during the gel. I'm not entirely sure the discounted portion didn't gel a bit. I still think it looks pretty and it was just for funsies. I’m going to try it again at some point. I’m really loving all white soaps.
I love your beer soap. It looks just like Guinness Stout!
 
I love your beer soap. It looks just like Guinness Stout!
Thank you! You are close - I used Left Hand Milk Stout which is my most favorite beer to drink. It pained me a little to put a bottle in soap, but I'm so curious to see how a beer soap performs. My first batch was a fail. :( Operator error. I'm still learning.
 
Thank you! You are close - I used Left Hand Milk Stout which is my most favorite beer to drink. It pained me a little to put a bottle in soap, but I'm so curious to see how a beer soap performs. My first batch was a fail. :( Operator error. I'm still learning.

Beer soap is amazing--its a favorite for most of my friends--to early to know what the customers think
 
Apparently im not doing anything soapy today because as I was melting my oils to make my first ever batch of cream soap I realized I used the rest of my KOH for laundry soap. :beatinghead::beatinghead::beatinghead: No One and I mean no one in my area sells any kind of lye so I'll have to visit the great land of Amazon on a 2 day journey to acquire some. :hairpulling:
 
Apparently im not doing anything soapy today because as I was melting my oils to make my first ever batch of cream soap I realized I used the rest of my KOH for laundry soap. :beatinghead::beatinghead::beatinghead: No One and I mean no one in my area sells any kind of lye so I'll have to visit the great land of Amazon on a 2 day journey to acquire some. :hairpulling:
Oh no - that's painfully frustrating! Thank goodness for Amazon though - they do ship quickly!
 
No soapy thing today although I did infuse rose petals and rose petal powder, which I will sometimes use as SF.... But I made lotion bars again, this time scented ones.
 
Apparently im not doing anything soapy today because as I was melting my oils to make my first ever batch of cream soap I realized I used the rest of my KOH for laundry soap. :beatinghead::beatinghead::beatinghead: No One and I mean no one in my area sells any kind of lye so I'll have to visit the great land of Amazon on a 2 day journey to acquire some. :hairpulling:

I have had plenty of times where I had to stop and run to the store cuz I don't have enough of something. luckily I live in an area that sells lye in the hdw store not koh though. bummer. good luck with the cream soap--is it a liquid soap then?
 
I have concluded that my salt soap at 15 months of age is not drying to my skin in Hawaiian Humidity. I used it a few times since our arrival for showering and bathing and once to shave my legs. When I tested it a year ago in the same climate (different Islands), it was still quite young and too drying on my skin. When I return (we begin our flight home the evening of the 30th) I will test the soap, first in Texas, then at home in Illinois and see if there is a difference in how my skin feels with subsequent uses in the different environments.
 
I have had plenty of times where I had to stop and run to the store cuz I don't have enough of something. luckily I live in an area that sells lye in the hdw store not koh though. bummer. good luck with the cream soap--is it a liquid soap then?
Not really liquid. Its more like a thick lotion only its soap
 
I made a soap with soy wax for the very first time. Or well, my soy wax is not pure, but also have palm wax in it, 20% palm wax I think it was. The supplier sent me the wrong type of soy wax. I was so nervous, i sort of expected a full seize immediately, or something like that. But it did not do it. It thickened, yes, and suddenly rapidly. But I added some water and it loosened up again so that I could work with it. I think my stickblender is way too powerful as well, even on the lowest setting. I did short bursts, but forgot to handstir in between. I wanted emulsion, which it was before it started to thicken on me. I ended up with thick trace. But, it was manageable for the time I needed (I do work very fast and leave a mess like no other), and I could have used longer time, actually. That is a big improvement from what I'm used to. I have used a vegetable lard kind of mixed product that really does seize up in an instant. Soy wax was way better. I actually could swirl the top with a chopstick. And that is truly amazing, since I have never been able to do things like that before.

I think soy wax can work really well. If I buy the cheapest ever slow working plastic stickblender, it would make it easier not to overmix.
I used the soy wax at 22,12% of the recipe. And had a 40% lye solution. My colors were mixed with water, and I added extra water to the uncolored part after it thickened. Plus EDTA was dissolved in water. All in all it had more water than the 40% lye solution. I soaped relatively hot, my oils were around 45 celsius and my lue 57 celsius (I was a little impatient to get started, so the lye was a little hotter than I originally wanted).

When I melted the oils together, it did take some heat for the soy wax to melt. But I did measure the temperature where my oils began to solidify again. And that was 32 degrees celsius. So, next time I will try to soap cooler, at 35 degrees celsius, and use a weaker lye solution (more water), reduce the amount of castor oil (I had 7,7%), remove the teaspoon of kaolin clay, remove the 1/2 teaspoon of sugar, and see if I get a more fluid batter. I know I can get stearic spots when soaping colder, but I don't bother too much about that.

I wonder one thing. I had a small rest of rice bran oil, and I have never soaped with it before (I bought it for soap but used it for cooking instead). I used 9,62% rice bran oil and the rest was refined olive oil and castor for my soft oils. What I wonder is if anybody know if rice bran oil can contribute to thickening of the batter? I mean, compared to refined olive oil, which is said to be one of the slowest to trace. Is rice bran oil quicker tracing? I want to try rice bran oil in much higher percentage, just to see how I like the final soap. Here, it is twice the price of olive oil, and I have only seen it in one shop, that is not even a grocery store but more like a dollar store type. It is definately not a common oil at all. But, it has more palmitic acid than olive oil, and since I can't find anything else that stinking red palm oil in this country (which I won't use), I want as much palmitic acid as possible without using palm oil (yes, I have not forgot that my soy wax have some palm in it).

I have high hopes for soy wax as a replacement for hard oils (which in this country is non-existing). I want to try even higher percentage of soy wax in a recipe, but don't dare before I have learned to work with it in a better way. My soy wax thatjust contains palm wax will probably never work the same as 100% soy wax anyway. But I have to use up what I have before buying anything else.

Since my soy wax have 20% (if I remember correctly) of palm wax in it, I had to mail the company Cargill and ask if they had sap.values for it. I got an answer with roughly sap.values, which seems to be very close to the listing for soy wax in lye calculators, so I could just use that. BUT, the guy at Cargill told me something strange, an asked me to explain how I could use this for soaping. So, I will see if I find anything unusual or strange or any problems with my soap, and then reply to him + ask him if I can post in this forum what he said.

Now I will go online and buy a new stickblender. I will look for a "worst in test" model, a flimsy plastic one that hardly spins. I think it would make the world a little easier if I could keep my nuclear powerhouse of a stickblender out of the soap bowl. But I will definately keep it, it is very good for liquid soap or anything slow tracing. Very good for hot process as well. But too good for the delicate cold process.

By the way, if anybody are desperately looking for a black afghan scent, Vanilla Oud from Eroma in Australia is, as I can judge, pure black afghan, which is a type of arabic mukhallath (perfume oil). I was sooo pleasantly surprised when I opened the bottle and had a sniff, it was finally the mukhallath type of scent I have been looking all over the world for (but I had it, stupid me have just not opened all my bottles). The pleasant surprise soon became disappointment. The scent is really nice and all that, very arabic and exotic. But, it is very smoky. Black afghan is supposed to be smoky, and of course Vanilla Oud was too. I like the smell of smoky scents, but I can't tolerate them, I get headache. So I had to find something to dillute it with. I used it in my soap, but mixed it with a scent called Oud, Amber & Musk (if I remember right), a more to me fruity type of smell. I'm not sure if I like the two combined or not. I will judge after some curing. Unfortunately it was still smoky. We'll see how it turns out in the end. I didn't like my colors either (dull and too similar and too mixed together and too weak colors, and my mica lines seemed to disappear), but I hope for a pleasant surprise when cutting. After all, the color is not the most important at the moment. It was more important to make a soap that does not mess out the sink with colored lather, and it is way more important right now how to soap feels, how it lathers, which type of later etc. Colors and design can easily be changed for the better in the future. It is much harder to nail a recipe that works how I would like it to. So that is the number one priority at the moment. I hope it will turn out beyond perfect with lots of shaving foam like lather, but we'll see.

And again, it became a tooooo long post with almost no content other than chit-chat. Well, well, another area where I need to make improvements.

Happy soaping, folks! :)
 
I made a soap with soy wax for the very first time. Or well, my soy wax is not pure, but also have palm wax in it, 20% palm wax I think it was. The supplier sent me the wrong type of soy wax. I was so nervous, i sort of expected a full seize immediately, or something like that. But it did not do it. It thickened, yes, and suddenly rapidly. But I added some water and it loosened up again so that I could work with it. I think my stickblender is way too powerful as well, even on the lowest setting. I did short bursts, but forgot to handstir in between. I wanted emulsion, which it was before it started to thicken on me. I ended up with thick trace. But, it was manageable for the time I needed (I do work very fast and leave a mess like no other), and I could have used longer time, actually. That is a big improvement from what I'm used to. I have used a vegetable lard kind of mixed product that really does seize up in an instant. Soy wax was way better. I actually could swirl the top with a chopstick. And that is truly amazing, since I have never been able to do things like that before.

I think soy wax can work really well. If I buy the cheapest ever slow working plastic stickblender, it would make it easier not to overmix.
I used the soy wax at 22,12% of the recipe. And had a 40% lye solution. My colors were mixed with water, and I added extra water to the uncolored part after it thickened. Plus EDTA was dissolved in water. All in all it had more water than the 40% lye solution. I soaped relatively hot, my oils were around 45 celsius and my lue 57 celsius (I was a little impatient to get started, so the lye was a little hotter than I originally wanted).

When I melted the oils together, it did take some heat for the soy wax to melt. But I did measure the temperature where my oils began to solidify again. And that was 32 degrees celsius. So, next time I will try to soap cooler, at 35 degrees celsius, and use a weaker lye solution (more water), reduce the amount of castor oil (I had 7,7%), remove the teaspoon of kaolin clay, remove the 1/2 teaspoon of sugar, and see if I get a more fluid batter. I know I can get stearic spots when soaping colder, but I don't bother too much about that.

I wonder one thing. I had a small rest of rice bran oil, and I have never soaped with it before (I bought it for soap but used it for cooking instead). I used 9,62% rice bran oil and the rest was refined olive oil and castor for my soft oils. What I wonder is if anybody know if rice bran oil can contribute to thickening of the batter? I mean, compared to refined olive oil, which is said to be one of the slowest to trace. Is rice bran oil quicker tracing? I want to try rice bran oil in much higher percentage, just to see how I like the final soap. Here, it is twice the price of olive oil, and I have only seen it in one shop, that is not even a grocery store but more like a dollar store type. It is definately not a common oil at all. But, it has more palmitic acid than olive oil, and since I can't find anything else that stinking red palm oil in this country (which I won't use), I want as much palmitic acid as possible without using palm oil (yes, I have not forgot that my soy wax have some palm in it).

I have high hopes for soy wax as a replacement for hard oils (which in this country is non-existing). I want to try even higher percentage of soy wax in a recipe, but don't dare before I have learned to work with it in a better way. My soy wax thatjust contains palm wax will probably never work the same as 100% soy wax anyway. But I have to use up what I have before buying anything else.

Since my soy wax have 20% (if I remember correctly) of palm wax in it, I had to mail the company Cargill and ask if they had sap.values for it. I got an answer with roughly sap.values, which seems to be very close to the listing for soy wax in lye calculators, so I could just use that. BUT, the guy at Cargill told me something strange, an asked me to explain how I could use this for soaping. So, I will see if I find anything unusual or strange or any problems with my soap, and then reply to him + ask him if I can post in this forum what he said.

Now I will go online and buy a new stickblender. I will look for a "worst in test" model, a flimsy plastic one that hardly spins. I think it would make the world a little easier if I could keep my nuclear powerhouse of a stickblender out of the soap bowl. But I will definately keep it, it is very good for liquid soap or anything slow tracing. Very good for hot process as well. But too good for the delicate cold process.

By the way, if anybody are desperately looking for a black afghan scent, Vanilla Oud from Eroma in Australia is, as I can judge, pure black afghan, which is a type of arabic mukhallath (perfume oil). I was sooo pleasantly surprised when I opened the bottle and had a sniff, it was finally the mukhallath type of scent I have been looking all over the world for (but I had it, stupid me have just not opened all my bottles). The pleasant surprise soon became disappointment. The scent is really nice and all that, very arabic and exotic. But, it is very smoky. Black afghan is supposed to be smoky, and of course Vanilla Oud was too. I like the smell of smoky scents, but I can't tolerate them, I get headache. So I had to find something to dillute it with. I used it in my soap, but mixed it with a scent called Oud, Amber & Musk (if I remember right), a more to me fruity type of smell. I'm not sure if I like the two combined or not. I will judge after some curing. Unfortunately it was still smoky. We'll see how it turns out in the end. I didn't like my colors either (dull and too similar and too mixed together and too weak colors, and my mica lines seemed to disappear), but I hope for a pleasant surprise when cutting. After all, the color is not the most important at the moment. It was more important to make a soap that does not mess out the sink with colored lather, and it is way more important right now how to soap feels, how it lathers, which type of later etc. Colors and design can easily be changed for the better in the future. It is much harder to nail a recipe that works how I would like it to. So that is the number one priority at the moment. I hope it will turn out beyond perfect with lots of shaving foam like lather, but we'll see.

And again, it became a tooooo long post with almost no content other than chit-chat. Well, well, another area where I need to make improvements.

Happy soaping, folks! :)


Would love to know what the man from Cargill said to youo_O I also found that I got a thick trace very quickly when mixing the soy wax with 40 % lye so maybe you don't need to buy another blender but can just hand stir?
 
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