Recent content by kelleyaynn

I make my salt bars with 90% CO, 10% shea butter, 18 - 20% superfat, and 50% kosher salt. When I do them unscented, they are a beautiful white. The only fragrance I've used in them is agave lime from Nature's Garden. It smells heavenly. I call it my "margarita salt bar!" I've had bars...

Thanks! :)

Since you can't determine which oil(s) will not get saponified when you superfat, has anyone tried adding the superfat oil to CPHP after the cook? Will that work? My recipe calls for a bit of sweet almond oil for superfatting, but of course there is no way of knowing whether or not that oil...

Nope, you don't want the lid to touch the soap. So when you sand it down, make sure it still sits above your soap batter.

Agave Lime from Nature's Garden. From the bottle is smells a bit like disinfectant, but when I use it in salt soap, it is awesome

Congratulations! Hope it went well on Thursday!

Congrats! Enjoy your success, and many more to come!

As an ex-microbiologist, I don't allow anything that is anti-bacterial in the house, with the exception of essential oils (and I'm not sure that is such a good idea either). The over-use of antibiotics and such is causing the emergence of the so called "superbugs" that are resistant to nearly...

Hey all! Glad to be back! I'll try and get some pics posted, but they are going to be pretty boring - I only colored one batch. Now if you could just smell the soap!.....

I just got the rich dark chocolate in my order a few days ago. Lucky for me, I'm going to make my students S'more soaps for the holidays, and that will work just fine.......

Irishlass, What do you think the bubble wrap does to prevent the cracking? Seems like the insulation from the bubble wrap would encourage over heating, so therefore cracking.

I agree. I would never store lye solution. I don't care that it takes some time to mix it up fresh each batch. I don't have young kids, but I do have cats that wander all over the house - and in the basement. And the garage is not a good environment to store chemicals either.

I've had a pretty rough summer, and haven't had the chance to soap for about three months. Haven't been on the board much either. Anyway, I finally got the chance to do some soaping the past two days. Nothing fancy, just a couple of batches of my go to shower soap recipe, and a batch of salt...

A superfat of 5% is a superfat of 5%. To make laundry soap, enter a superfat of 0% into the lye calculator.

I've used aloe juice instead of water, 100%. Dissolved my lye in it and had no problems. Since even at trace most of the lye is still active, adding aloe juice at trace isn't going to "save" it from the lye, if the lye is going to do anything to it. I don't know how much lye will react with...