Recent content by chicklet

Alkanet Your soap looks great! I like to put alkanet root in my shampoo bars. I'm not claiming it does anything miraculous, but I think it helps hide my gray hair somehow. Maybe it camoflauges it or just tones down the gray so it blends in with the dark hair better, I don't know, but I won't...

Isg - thanks for the tip about Riceland. I just checked out their prices and wow! Great price on the rice bran oil.

You could pour, wait a day, then pour on top - they will stick together. The downside is having to basically make soap twice. The other method would work if you made a fresh batch for the top, same as waiting a day. What I usually do is make a batch, separate and color, get both batches to a...

I put my milk soap into the freezer for an hour or two or five, then move it to the fridge. I usually freeze/fridge them a total of 48 hours (probably longer than necessary) then I let the loaf sit on the counter several more hours before I cut. If I need my mold I do go ahead and unmold when I...

Love the new setup. Be sure and take another picture in a few weeks so we can see it after all those batches of curing soap have taken over all your nice clean, uncluttered space. :)

Ruthie that's wonderful - and encouraging to the rest of us. An experienced soaper told me that, in her experience, craft shows are more about "getting the word out" than how much you actually sell at the fair. Sounds like you had a good day selling AND got the word out. Way to go! :)

Cool!! Congratulations!!! I'm totally jealous!! j/k (yeah, not really, I'm totally jealous) :)

That amount of coconut oil might make the soap feel drying (stripping too many oils from the skin), especially with just a 5% SF. If you've used that much before and you like how it feels, then go for it. :)

It just depends on what properties you're looking for in your soap. That much olive oil means it probably will take a while to trace and it will probably need a longer cure for it to be its best. I've never used palm kernel flakes, but it looks like a good recipe to me.

Okay now I'm thinking it wouldn't be 7.4 oz of extra lye in the 2nd batch, it would be some amount in proportion to your original measurements - a combination of lye and water that equals 7.4 oz. Which would mean your first batch wasn't missing quite as much lye as I first thought. Have you cut...

But for your first batch it called for 19.8 oz water PLUS 7.4 oz lye (total weight 30 oz). You only used 19.8 oz. so your second batch has 7.4 oz too much lye. No wonder it crumbled! :)

So pretty!

Just re-read your post and saw that you did weigh the lye/water for the first batch. Hmm.... the mystery deepens. If you weighed everything correctly when you mixed up the lye and water, then you weighed the amount you put into your first batch, the amount left *should* have been the correct...

I think you could be right that the error was in mixing the lye for 2 batches at once then splitting it, but could you share your recipes? That would help pinpoint the problem with the zapping batch. The first one with the rings - weird, probably cosmetic, but again, recipes might help someone...

I cure my salt bars at least 3 months. They're even better at 6 months.