Help with soap recipe?

[Rah]

Hi, I'm not new here but I haven't made any soap for a few years and even then, I only tried a couple of times (once successfully) so I need a little help with a recipe I just made!

My friend and I decided to make a recipe from "The Handmade Soap Book" by Melinda Coss. Thing is, we couldn't get one of the ingredients and didn't have enough of another so I had to sub some. I ran it through a lye calculator and also worked it out myself using SAP values, but I got a slightly different result from each (the book says to round to nearest 1/4 oz when calculating lye amounts and I ended up with 4oz, which was the same as it was in the original recipe with the extra oil I couldn't get hold of, so I was worried the recipe would be a bit lye heavy)
Anyway, we settled on a recipe and made it and it seems to have worked (just took it out the molds 2 days later, smells nice and is a nice pale green colour, although I cut it pretty shabbily haha!), but it still needs time to cure so I can't be sure. I was wondering if someone who knows more about this stuff could look over the recipe I used and tell me if it seems right?

22 oz Olive Oil
3.25 oz Sweet Almond Oil
4 oz Castor Oil
2 oz Beeswax
8 fl oz stinging nettles blended with distilled water
3.88 oz sodium hydroxide
1/2 oz wheatgerm oil
2 tsp clary sage essential oil
2 tsp bergamot essential oil

Oh also, it traced really quite fast. In about 20 mins I think? Is this normal? I looked it up and think it could be because we combined the oil and lye at a fairly high temperature (about 59 C) But that's what it said in the original recipe we adapted. Can that effect the overall outcome of the soap?

Thanks in advance!
-Rebecca

 

[Hazel]

I entered this on SoapCalc and came up with 3.9 oz lye with a 5% discount. So, it doesn't look like it will be lye heavy as long as your scale was accurate and everything was weighed correctly.

Personally, I wouldn't round the lye amount to the nearest 1/4 oz. It's just my opinion but if you want to round off, then I'd round it down to the lower .1 amount just to be safe. That's what I do. For example, you listed 3.88 oz lye in the recipe and I'd use 3.8 oz instead of rounding up to 3.9 oz if I was making it. But it really is a minimal amount and it would hardly affect the outcome. However, if you had a recipe which had 3.75 oz lye and you rounded up to 4 oz that would make a huge difference and you'd most probably have a lye heavy batch. Although in a large batch, .25 oz wouldn't make much of a difference but most of us don't make 10+ lb batches. At least, I don't.

I've found soaping at higher temps does accelerate trace in my recipes. 20 minutes is actually longer than my recipes take to trace but I use a stickblender. I think your recipe took 20 minutes because of the high amount of olive and the softer oils. Blending the lye and oils at a higher temp also helps to ensure gelling.