Help for a tired brain

Soapmaking Forum

Help Support Soapmaking Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

nsmar4211

Well-Known Member
Joined
May 28, 2015
Messages
600
Reaction score
289
Figuring out how much soap I need to make for gifts so I can figure out how much supplies to buy. Need help checking my measurement reasoning :).

To do this, I have figured the number of bars per scent at 18. Guessing weight is 4oz based on what I've made (and will vary depending on mold/technique, but we'll call em 4oz and i"ll have leftovers).So, I would need 72 oz of soap per scent. Disregarding weight loss from curing (since I'm not selling) in my case.

So, if I toddle over to soap calc and use 66.67% lard, 25% coconut, 8.33% shea butter.... call it 32% water by weight here. I should be able to just plug in numbers of oil oz until my total batch weight is close to 72oz and go with it, right (like attached)? I'm not over thinking this? Then just multiply those amounts by 4 (number of scents i"m doing) and that'll give me total supplies I need....and I'm done?

Course, I may need to go to 35% water depending on my scent but I figured more water would just increase the batch size and I'll just have some for me...

And now that I'm looking at that, I may need to make these in two batches per scent cause that sounds huge to do all at once at my level...then i wouldn't waste as much if gremlins appear....:shock:

ssssss.jpg
 
I'd figure mine based on which mold I have to create the closest approximation of bar tallies. If I knew I wanted to make 18 bars of 4 different scents, I'd bust out my 9 bar slab mold and use it for two identical batches giving me a total of 8 batches. Since I already have a recipe that fits my slab mold, I'd multiple each oil of that recipe by 8 to determine the ingredient amounts for the whole project. Bonus: using the same mold/bar size makes wrapping up all those soaps go much faster (at least for how I package them). Plus they look nice and tidy in a pretty stack of soap bricks!

I wouldn't try to fiddle with water amounts since I'm lazy and figure whatever variation I did would just evaporate out eventually.

Do you have a mold in mind?
 
Snappy, that's a good point with the mold....I'm on the fence whether I'm doing my individual molds mainly or just say ferget it and doing them in the loaf molds and cutting. Good point about the wrapping too

TEG...hrmmmm I apparently have not playing with the soap calc enough but I only see where to put in total amount of oils, not total soap weight.... I'll have to play after work and see if I can find this batch size thingie... :)
 
..............TEG...hrmmmm I apparently have not playing with the soap calc enough but I only see where to put in total amount of oils, not total soap weight.... I'll have to play after work and see if I can find this batch size thingie... :)

If you know your target batch weight and your prefered water amount, you can get your oil weight somewhere in the right region and then adjust the oil weight until the batch weight is spot on - it saves having to adjust each oil in the list, you can just adjust 1 figure.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top