Haha Helppp!

[chicklet]

Having slept since I posted earlier, I feel the need to say more about essential oils. I do not mean to imply that you should not be careful with essential oils. You defintely should be careful. There is a lot of info here on the forum as well as people much more versed in essential oils than I am. Having said that, lavender essential oil is not one prone to causing problems such as volcanos or fast trace so I doubt if the lavender essential oil was the problem in your batch. Too much lavender could irritate the skin, and usage guidelines should be followed, but I was posting about what could make the batch of soap go wrong.

 

[Soapyguy]

Thanks for the information. It was lavender essential oil by the way and we may have used a little too much. Does anyone have any suggestions for curing the soap? What container to put it in/the air environment?

 

[Kansas Farm Girl]

I thought I remembered hearing about having your oils in the 140 degree range so went looking for it. I heard it on a You Tube video by EdentiaFarms
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nw4CBN_RC0&feature=player_embedded[/ame]
where she is showing how to make an HP melt and pour base. I think I heard it on another site about HP also. I don't HP very often, but it makes sense to me that if you are putting your oils in the crock pot you would end up with temps about that range.
Soapyguy - are you sure that your book was talking about CP (cold process) and not HP (hot process) when it mentions this temp?

 

[hoegarden]

Most books and articles that I have read with recipes for soap usually say mix your lye/water solution into your oils when both temps are between 95 to 110 degrees F. And the the oils and lye/water mixture should be within 5 degrees of each other. I have never seen 120 to 140 degrees for a mixing temp.

My reading is similar as well.

In the books that I own and read, the temperatures that were call for is between 40degree celcius to 50degree celcius. The optimum temperature is to be 5 degree apart but not more than 10 degrees apart.

Personally I did my soaps by keep the lye to 45 degree celcius and the oil to 50 degree celcius. And I make sure that the temperature of the traced mixture is about 38-40degree celcius before going into the mold.

So far, I did not have any issue with that.

The only time that I seen a volcano is when I did a milk soap. That requires even lower temperatures.

 

[2lilboots]

When I did the frozen milk and added my lye to that, I ended up with a temp of 23 C. I also had my lye bucket sitting in a dishpan of icewater. My oils were room temp so it didn't matter. The soap turned out great.

 

[MaitriBB]

Soapguy, are you able to post the exact recipe that you used, including weights? Also, how much EO did you use? Did you measure it or just eyeball it?

 

[Soapsugoii]

ALWAYS run ANY recipe from any book or website or any other source through a lye calculator.

This. A lot of recipes in soaping books can be funky, and not quite so good really. Always double check.

I soap on the hotter side. What kind of oils are you using? I use cocoa butter in my recipe, so I usually soap 120-130 to make sure it doesn't cool during mixing. My lye is always slightly hotter.