Mushy rainbows! Any hope?

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AAShillito

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I've made 4 batches of this so far but this one is still mushy after 4 days in my new NS mold. I've got it out of the mold in front of a fan. It was super hot Thursday when we made it. 85 in my kitchen and I soaped at 115-120 to try to keep the Shea butter from going wonky. Stripes are perfect too. 😭😭😭😭
https://lovinsoap.com/2020/06/rainbow-soap-2/
What's weird is that each layer set up well before we poured the next. I'm hoping we can save most of it. It's like the purple layer gave up and died
 

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Why did you unmold it while it was still mushy? It is a very soft recipe that will not last very long either.

Personally, I am not at all fond of Lovin' Soap recipes. I would have used a 40% Lye concentration not a 33.3% Lye concentration if I was going to use that recipe. The addition of Palm, Lard, or Tallow would greatly improve the recipe making it set up better and lasting much longer. Even though it shows a hardness of 40 once you deduct the cleansing number of 20 from your 40 you end up with 20 with shows your soap is a highly soluble soap that will melt quickly with use. Deducting the Cleansing Number from the Hardness number gives you the Longevity factor you want that as high as you can get. I like mine around 35. It will also play a little in how your soap will set up, at least I have found that out at times. Using RBO with Olive Oil is a bit of a moot point since RBO is a pretty good replacement for OO.
 
Why did you unmold it while it was still mushy? It is a very soft recipe that will not last very long either.

Personally, I am not at all fond of Lovin' Soap recipes. I would have used a 40% Lye concentration not a 33.3% Lye concentration if I was going to use that recipe. The addition of Palm, Lard, or Tallow would greatly improve the recipe making it set up better and lasting much longer. Even though it shows a hardness of 40 once you deduct the cleansing number of 20 from your 40 you end up with 20 with shows your soap is a highly soluble soap that will melt quickly with use. Deducting the Cleansing Number from the Hardness number gives you the Longevity factor you want that as high as you can get. I like mine around 35. It will also play a little in how your soap will set up, at least I have found that out at times. Using RBO with Olive Oil is a bit of a moot point since RBO is a pretty good replacement for OO.
We were planning on cutting and didn't realize how bad the ends were

Why did you unmold it while it was still mushy? It is a very soft recipe that will not last very long either.

Personally, I am not at all fond of Lovin' Soap recipes. I would have used a 40% Lye concentration not a 33.3% Lye concentration if I was going to use that recipe. The addition of Palm, Lard, or Tallow would greatly improve the recipe making it set up better and lasting much longer. Even though it shows a hardness of 40 once you deduct the cleansing number of 20 from your 40 you end up with 20 with shows your soap is a highly soluble soap that will melt quickly with use. Deducting the Cleansing Number from the Hardness number gives you the Longevity factor you want that as high as you can get. I like mine around 35. It will also play a little in how your soap will set up, at least I have found that out at times. Using RBO with Olive Oil is a bit of a moot point since RBO is a pretty good replacement for OO.
I'm going to sub palm for the rbo and see how it looks in smf
 
Bumping for more help. I've gone ahead and sliced this into bars and it's still soft. How can i turn it into an embed safely? It is definitely soap as I just washed all my cutting stuff. My theoretical idea was to use a cookie cutter, cut hearts, stack them and freeze? But how and at what stage do I add to a plain white bar? And is anyone willing to share a hard white bar recipe without lard? Thank you!!
 
Bumping for more help. I've gone ahead and sliced this into bars and it's still soft. How can i turn it into an embed safely? It is definitely soap as I just washed all my cutting stuff. My theoretical idea was to use a cookie cutter, cut hearts, stack them and freeze? But how and at what stage do I add to a plain white bar? And is anyone willing to share a hard white bar recipe without lard? Thank you!!

Here are some of my observations & suggestions.

If you want to know how to safely use this soap, perhaps you need to do a zap test to make sure it is not lye heavy. (Click the purple link.) I doubt that it is, if all your weighing was accurate.

As far as using them for embeds, your impatience is probably your enemy when it comes to cutting them into shapes. You say they are now cut bars, but still too soft. So it's still too soon to cut with plastic cookie cutters. You could, but if you do it while still too soft, the shapes will not hold up around the edges. WAIT patiently. I know patience may be elusive, but it will reward you.

Find something else to do in the meantime. Search the forum for how people manage to get very white soap. That can take some time for sure (the searching and the reading.) Or play around with Soapmaking Recipe Builder & Lye Calculator designing your own recipes and make a small trial batch of soap.

Once your bars are no longer too soft, test cut ONLY ONE BAR with your chosen plastic cookie cutter (or STAINLESS STEEL, but not any other metal cutter) and see how it goes with JUST ONE BAR. If it is still too soft, leave the rest of the bars our to the air and wait some more.

Once your embeds are cut, then you can decide how to store them. If they are firm enough that you can stack them without damaging them, by all means, stack away. But if you do choose to freeze them, be prepared for another patience waiting game once they come out of the freezer. You will have to leave them alone, UNTOUCHED for a good length of time before they can be handled again. AND if you try to take the pieces apart rather than leave them all in the stack as a COLUMN EMBED, you will likely damage them.

So, what I would do is decide now if they are going to be a Column embed (a column of hearts, or whatever shape you choose) or individual embeds. If you want them to be individual embeds, then I would suggest you place a piece of plastic wrap between each cut shape when stacking them together. Then when you are ready to use them in your new soap, just take apart using the edge of the plastic wrap to pull them off each other.

Instead of freezing, once they are cut and stacked, you can just wrap the entire stack of embeds in air-tight plastic wrap and store in a container to prevent them being knocked about. That will stop them drying out too much prior to being used as embeds, but curing will continue (a bit more slowly, but it will continue.) You will want to use the embeds within a reasonable amount of time of course, not keep them stored this way indefinitely, but I have had no trouble storing soap for later use in other projects in this fashion.

Make sure to lightly wet the outer surface of the embeds when you do use them if you wait a long time, just to facilitate a good adhesion between old and new soap.
 
Here are some of my observations & suggestions.

If you want to know how to safely use this soap, perhaps you need to do a zap test to make sure it is not lye heavy. (Click the purple link.) I doubt that it is, if all your weighing was accurate.

As far as using them for embeds, your impatience is probably your enemy when it comes to cutting them into shapes. You say they are now cut bars, but still too soft. So it's still too soon to cut with plastic cookie cutters. You could, but if you do it while still too soft, the shapes will not hold up around the edges. WAIT patiently. I know patience may be elusive, but it will reward you.

Find something else to do in the meantime. Search the forum for how people manage to get very white soap. That can take some time for sure (the searching and the reading.) Or play around with Soapmaking Recipe Builder & Lye Calculator designing your own recipes and make a small trial batch of soap.

Once your bars are no longer too soft, test cut ONLY ONE BAR with your chosen plastic cookie cutter (or STAINLESS STEEL, but not any other metal cutter) and see how it goes with JUST ONE BAR. If it is still too soft, leave the rest of the bars our to the air and wait some more.

Once your embeds are cut, then you can decide how to store them. If they are firm enough that you can stack them without damaging them, by all means, stack away. But if you do choose to freeze them, be prepared for another patience waiting game once they come out of the freezer. You will have to leave them alone, UNTOUCHED for a good length of time before they can be handled again. AND if you try to take the pieces apart rather than leave them all in the stack as a COLUMN EMBED, you will likely damage them.

So, what I would do is decide now if they are going to be a Column embed (a column of hearts, or whatever shape you choose) or individual embeds. If you want them to be individual embeds, then I would suggest you place a piece of plastic wrap between each cut shape when stacking them together. Then when you are ready to use them in your new soap, just take apart using the edge of the plastic wrap to pull them off each other.

Instead of freezing, once they are cut and stacked, you can just wrap the entire stack of embeds in air-tight plastic wrap and store in a container to prevent them being knocked about. That will stop them drying out too much prior to being used as embeds, but curing will continue (a bit more slowly, but it will continue.) You will want to use the embeds within a reasonable amount of time of course, not keep them stored this way indefinitely, but I have had no trouble storing soap for later use in other projects in this fashion.

Make sure to lightly wet the outer surface of the embeds when you do use them if you wait a long time, just to facilitate a good adhesion between old and new soap.
Thank u Earlene for all the helpful advice. I will endeavor to be as patient as possible. My thoughts on freezing were to keep them from melting if I add to new soap ( please correct me if I'm wrong) . My plan was for a column embed. I will use the plastic wrap method you suggested. Thank you 😊
 

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