Recipe Organization Tips for Beginners

[MarisaJensen]

Hello everyone.

Keeping notes on recipes is incredibly important when your learning how to make soap as well as keeping track of your work if your a seasoned soap maker. It's in good practice to take detailed notes on every batch good and bad. To start, if your not familiar with
www.soapcalc.net you should head over immediately and familiarize yourself with the Lye Calculator.

Here are a few examples of what I would do BEFORE, DURING, and AFTER making soap.

• 1. Go to calculator and put in all the information for your recipe like the first image.
  
• 2. Once done with making your recipe click on Calculate Recipe then View/Print Recipe.
  
• 3. Once you see your recipe like Picture 2, make sure your satisfied with it. In that page you will be able to write on Additives and Notes. I usually leave this page up and type any additional ingredients I'll be adding and write notes while I soap. EXAMPLES are: What colors did you use and quantity. What E/O or F/O or Blend did you use. How did it react with soap once added? Where there any color discoloration and what where the soaping temperatures?
  
• 4. Once I'm done making soap I print it and add additional notes while the soap is curing.
  
• 5. I print out the INCI Names on the top right as well as the recipe. See picture 3 and 4.

Finally I put all my recipes in a binder and I'm always able to look back and see what was successful and what wasn't. I learn by going through my recipes. It also helps when you have an erupting volcano on your table and need to ask in the forums for help and advice.

Hope this was helpful to anyone who is new and wants to be a successful soap maker.

 

[MarisaJensen]

BTW the recipe in the pictures is an example. I've never actually made it, I randomly put that in.

 

[IrishLass]

Great tips, Marissa!


IrishLass

 

[Susie]

Great tips!

I do exactly the same(minus the INCI names), then I have a binder with different sections: Body Bars, Shampoo Bars, Liquid Shampoos, Liquid Hand Soaps, Liquid Household soaps, Other products, Failures, Misc. Each section has a pocket divider so I can save recipes to try. I think the failure section is the most important. I need to not repeat bad experiences because of poor memory.

 

[MarisaJensen]

Thanks IrishLass.

Susie, that's great! That's how I have my binder. Nothing has helped me more than seeing my mistakes and learning how to fix them and being able to understand what I did wrong.