Please help - newbie in need!

[Rah]

Hello! I am a newbie at soap making (I've only made one batch so far!) and am planning to make my next one soon. I am following a recipe from a book like I did with my previous soap, HOWEVER... when I uploaded my last recipe I was told that I should try my next with 5% lye discount as my previous one had 0% discount.
I have put my recipe into the soapcalc to try to calculate the amount of lye to put in now, but I am not sure if I have done it correctly as I found it very confusing.

Here is my original recipe:
28oz Olive Oil
2oz beeswax
2 egg yolks
2oz creamed coconut
9.5oz distilled water
4oz lye
2tbsp lemon EO
1tsp vitamin E oil

The recipe I have after putting it into the soap calculator is the same for the oils, but with:
11.4oz distilled water
3.731oz lye
Plus, it did not allow me to put in the weights of my extra additives so I do not know how much I need to change them by. Same with the fragrance. :?

I was wondering if someone who is experienced at using the soapcalc could run my original recipe through and see if I have done it correctly?
Sorry about this!

Another stupid question - I think I read somewhere (can't remember where... I may even have imagined it) that you can't for example halve soap recipes (to make a smaller batch) as the process won't work. Is this true? The problem is, I have bought two bottles of (pretty expensive) EO so far and I STILL don't have enough!

Any and all help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks a lot,
Rah

 

[Etelka]

http://www.thesage.com/calcs/lyecalc2.php

This is the calculator I use, but mostly I will use "Soapmaker" which I bought from Woodi, I dont know if she is on this board or not but it is wonderful, you put your figures in and it will tell you exactly what kind of soap you will end up with, hardness, lather, moisturising, I'll post the link if you're interested, it is free for 30 days (used to be, hope it still is)
The only two things to plug in your recipe is your olive oil and beeswax and if you do that your lye amount is correct. The creamed coconut and the eggs are part of your water content so that should be deducted from your 11 oz of water, which is btw the maximum. The essential oil can be anything from 2% to 4% or even 5% of your total oil content. I would not be putting any VitE in it, bc I feel it would just get lost in the saponification process, best to put those kinda things in leave on products, just my 2c worth
HIH
Etelka

 

[Rah]

Thanks for the reply!
I would love to try out 'Soapmaker' thank you. Could you please provide a link?
Thanks for the help, I think I understand now except I am confused as to how come the eggs and coconut are not deducted from the water content in the original recipe? Because adding the weight of the eggs and the coconut there means the water content would be over 11oz.
Also, if the extra ingredients are part of the water content, would that mean I mix them in with the water and the lye at the beginning? Because according to my recipe I have to mix the eggs with a bit of the olive oil (about 1oz I think) and add it in after trace with the coconut, vit E and EO.

I am using the vitamin E because apparently the lemon scent needs fixing or it will be lost. I really do not want to take chances with that because that EO was expensive.

I'm sorry for all this "according to my recipe" stuff, I've only made soap once before (and it was far simpler, as I didn't try to do lye discounting) so I am very worried about doing it wrong, especially since I've spent so much money on the ingredients. :?

 

[Etelka]

http://www.soapmaker.ca/

Because adding the weight of the eggs and the coconut there means the water content would be over 11oz.
Also, if the extra ingredients are part of the water content, would that mean I mix them in with the water and the lye at the beginning? Because according to my recipe I have to mix the eggs with a bit of the olive oil (about 1oz I think) and add it in after trace with the coconut, vit E and EO.

You don't add the eggs and the coconut to the 11 oz, you deduct it so your water content would be 11 oz altogether, and dont add it to your water but to the oils. As far as the Vit. E being a fixative for your lemon EO, I doubt it would work, I have never heard of it at least. In my experience no matter what you do lemon EO will fade and fade reasonably fast in CP, the only great citrus eo that stays well in soap is Litsea Cubeba (May Chang) its devine.
Etelka

 

[topcat]

IMO Etelka is right on the money Rah. Your soapcalc amounts of lye and water are fine for 5% superfat. Weigh your egg yolk and creamed coconut and subtract this weight from your water amount before you add the lye and discard this un-needed water. Then follow your recipe for how to add the egg yolk and coconut cream and when. Soapmaker programme is amazing and I also check each new recipe with soapcalc online too - they come out very close but soapmaker has a neat graph to show you how your soap will turn out.

I have found that citrus EOs do fade in CP....and Litsea sticks really well. I read in another thread that Litsea helps other citrus EOs stick longer in a soap so I now add a small proportion extra of Litsea (say 1 tsp) to each citrus fragranced batch I make.

Tanya

 

[Rah]

You don't add the eggs and the coconut to the 11 oz, you deduct it so your water content would be 11 oz altogether, and dont add it to your water but to the oils.

I understood this is what you were telling me to do, but what confused me is that in the original recipe this has not been done, so that the water content is over 11oz. (i.e. the 9.5oz of water + the coconut is already 11.5oz, and that's not even including the eggs!)
Should I be mentioning that this is supposed to be a shampoo bar? (I don't know if they differ in any way from regular soap bars, but if they do this may be the cause for the excess water perhaps?)

As for the EOs, I think I will try the vitamin E oil anyway, seeing as I have bought it now and have no other uses for it. If the lemon doesn't stay I may try Litsea in future, as you suggest. Thank you very much for the advice.

And thanks for your help as well, topcat. I may just have to take another trip to the health shop to try and find some Litsea...

Another question, is it possible to halve my recipe to make a smaller batch or does this mess things up?

Thanks x

 

[carebear]

first, thats a VERY challenging recipe - I wouldn't recommend it for a beginner. but that's just me.
beeswax: you will need to soap pretty hot
eggs: scrambled egg soap is such a deligth
coconut cream: overheating in a can

yes you can halve the recipe but run that through the calculator; don't just cut everything in half (rounding errors and all)

shampoo bars dont' need excess water - so I'd follow what the others here told you in terms of liquid (I've not run it through the calc myself)

 

[carebear]

wanted to add that you will want to melt your beeswax in some of your olive oil. if you try to melt it on its own much of it won't come out of the container and it will re-solidify once it hits the olive oil unless that's really hot.

 

[Rah]

first, thats a VERY challenging recipe - I wouldn't recommend it for a beginner. but that's just me.

Oh dear, I'm worried now. :? Is there anyway I could do the same recipe but simplified? Like, maybe remove the beeswax?
Or I could just try a different one altogether... I'm quite interested in making a chocolatey soap, perhaps.

I would double check the halved recipe against a calculator, don't worry!

Thanks for the advice. :]

 

[topcat]

Yeah Rah....I would hesitate to make that soap and I have 20 batches under my belt now....I know!....eat the eggs, make beeswax decorations out of the beeswax and get straight onto that chocolate soap! It will be awesome methinks :wink:

Tanya

 

[Rah]

Yeah Rah....I would hesitate to make that soap and I have 20 batches under my belt now....I know!....eat the eggs, make beeswax decorations out of the beeswax and get straight onto that chocolate soap! It will be awesome methinks

Ooooh okay. It's a shame, I have all these ingredients now and nothing to do with them!
The chocolate soap recipe says to use beef dripping, but lots of my friends are vegetarians so could I just substitute that for another oil? (it also contains coconut and veggie fat.) Also, I'd be adding plain cooking chocolate, so I presume that, as it's an added ingredient, it would count as part of the water content like in the previous soap? I want to know this because I want to use more chocolate than it says in the recipe so need to know how to adjust the rest of the recipe accordingly.

Sorry for all the questions! Still learning.
Thanks!

Also, 20 batches of soap?! That's huge! I'm presuming you sell them? Because that must cost loads to make, otherwise.
I don't know if I'd ever be able to sell soap - I took some I made to school today to give to people and I got looked at as though I was mad. Some people did like it though, but they were my friends so I was obliged to give it to them for free....

 

[topcat]

Just starting to sell now....I needed to learn just what I wanted to make and what recipes I feel will be best accepted by my market.....we will see how it all goes!

I am assuming beef dripping is tallow so a good substitute for tallow is palm oil, although always run any changes through a lye calculator first to adjust your lye and water content. Chocolate is not a liquid really - I feel it is just an additive and doesn't need to be taken into account with your water content. The fat in it is probably like butter fat but shouldn't been enough to worry about adjusting your lye for....you will just be superfatting a little bit more.

I have found that I can read someone elses recipe and adjust it to suit the oils I prefer to use. Coconut oil and solid veggie fat are both hard oils and may contribute enough hardness on their own to your recipe without using the dripping, depending on the percentage of oils they are in your recipe - I usually go with at least 50% hard oils in each recipe. If you have olive oil that will also contribute hardness to a bar of soap over time....it sort of starts off softer but hardens up amazingly after 4 - 6 weeks or more.

If it is any help I usually use these oils for my base and then play with other ingredients for each recipe:

Coconut Oil 30%
Olive Oil 25%
Rice Bran Oil 25%
Shea Butter 10%
Palm Oil 10%

You may prefer to not use palm oil and if so you can up the shea butter amount. Palm is just a very cost effective alternative with some similar properties to shea.

You can make a very nice bar of soap with just Olive & Coconut. Many soapers swear by this blend. I wouldn't go higher than 50% coconut at first though, as it may be drying. 50/50 of each oil gives a good hard bar with fluffy lather which is fairly stable and okay in the conditioning department. Superfatting (discounting your lye) to 6-8% will help with conditioning too.

Sorry to ramble on Rah....just tossing around a few ideas. Hopefully other more experienced soapers will chime in with their ideas and you can get a better feel for what you want to do now.

Tanya

 

[carebear]

20 is huge? heck I'm in the area of 250 and I'm just starting to sell. R&D is very time and investment intensive. not to say everyone waits that long but 20 is minimal when you are talking about selling.

you need to get your formula and look "just so" and you need to practice so your soaps come out with a consistent look and feel.

 

[topcat]

20 is huge? heck I'm in the area of 250 and I'm just starting to sell. R&D is very time and investment intensive. not to say everyone waits that long but 20 is minimal when you are talking about selling.

you need to get your formula and look "just so" and you need to practice so your soaps come out with a consistent look and feel.

What carebear said! She is the master (or do I mean 'mistress'?....). So carebear, you are just starting to sell? I kinda wanted to wait longer, though I am happy with my recipes, but my family and friends are spreading the word - so I always explain to anyone who wants to buy my soap that I am still in the development stage and price my soap accordingly. It's working so far....

Tanya

 

[Rah]

20 is huge? heck I'm in the area of 250 and I'm just starting to sell. R&D is very time and investment intensive. not to say everyone waits that long but 20 is minimal when you are talking about selling.

I misread it and thought she meant she was trying to MAKE 20 at the same time. I know that is not possible for one person and so doesn't make any sense but my brain didn't register it, haha.

And topcat - I'm feeling slightly reluctant to use vegetable shortening now as I cannot find it on any of the lye calculators. I was also thinking perhaps I could use some olive oil, because the last one I made was mostly olive and that one came out well nice! So yeah, I may go for your suggestion of an olive oil and coconut oil bar. Perhaps if I find some palm oil I could use some of that, too.
Shea butter sounds nice, might look out for that. How about cocoa butter? I really like that stuff. Would that work? Also do those two things count as oils or additives?
This is all so confusing!! I hope I start to understand it all soon.

And ramble away! I really appreciate the help.

 

[carebear]

20 at a time LOL!

Yea I'm slow, anal, and obsessive. So I'm just starting to sell. My web site should be up within a couple of months.

Selling is also SO much more complex than making soap...

(taxes, register company fed & state, company name, insurance, web site, etsy, bookkeeping, inventory, cog, suppliers, business cards, packaging, labels, business phone...)

 

[Rah]

Haha yeah, you'd have to have about 50 pairs of arms.

And that does sound complicated! I wish you luck with it.

 

[topcat]

Cocoa butter is awesome in soap! All hard oils, liquid oils and butters are classed as 'oils' for soapmaking. If you look at soapcalc's lye calc online and just scroll through their list of oils you will get a good idea what is an oil for soaping.

If you look in the soap recipes section here on the forum and scroll down to Pauls Walmart recipe that may give you some good ideas for ingredients....a lot of good stuff can be found at your local supermarket. Vege shortening can be found in the refrigerated section and it is known as 'frymasta' in Australia....but any solid wrapped cube of frying oil which has the words 'blended vegetable oil' is vege shortening. I have been told that the frymasta here is actually palm oil so check out whether you can get palm oil at your supermarket.

Tanya

 

[Etelka]

Rah, if you wish to make a chocolate soap instead of putting real chocolate in, try and use cocoa powder, disolve it in a bit of warm water and then add it to your oils, a little goes a long way, so go with small amounts and add if you want it darker. I have only used it as a swirl, but it does look very nice and dark.
Beeswax, yes be careful with it cause it can overheat like hell, I remember my first time with it many years ago, I had tunnels through that soap you could drive a train through..lol
Dont forget to check out soapmaker it will actually compare your soap with a basic soap recipe and tell you how the two compare, you will love it

Cocoa butter is awesome in soap

I agree it is nice and it will give you a very hard bar, but I hate the lather, not bubbly but rather creamy, in fact I would go one step further and say that it inhibits the lather
Etelka

 

[Rah]

Topcat - we have a vege shortening product here called Trex or something, I'm just not sure how similar it will be to crisco (the one which is in soapcalc) and so how accurate the amounts which come out will be.
I'm going to find some palm oil I think though to substitute for the tallow as I realised that straying too far from the recipe on only my second soap may lead to disaster...

Etelka - thanks for the tip! I think I'll try and stick to the original recipe this time around but I will be sure to try that out in future!

I'm afraid I am confused about this water content thing again...
The recipe from the book is:
12oz vegetable shortening
8oz tallow (which I would use palm oil for)
12oz coconut oil
0.5oz plain cooking chocolate (or more if you want it more chocolatey)
10oz distilled or spring water
4.5oz goat's milk
5 oz sodium hydroxide

It's the water content thing which gets me... if the maximum is 11oz, why does this have so much more? :?

I'm sorry about all this.... I take forever to understand anything...