I use sugar, too, and use a 50/50 mb lye concentration as well. Here's my process:
I will buy the slab mold if you ate selling itMade three batches of soap, including Try #3 for this month's challenge. My hand bobbled on two of the colors, so I'm expecting to see some drop-swirl action in between the shimmies. Ah well. The other two were confetti soaps with a fruity FO. They are all tucked in for the night, and I'm looking forward to some cutting fun tomorrow.
I also sorted and organized my soap cabinet and the FOUR de-stash boxes from @cmzaha. To summarize, my soaping supplies are no longer limited to the big soap cabinet; they can also be found in the big entry credenza, the spare bedroom closet, and some of the garage shelving. That doesn't include the slab mold, grid cutter, and single-wire cutter that are sitting out on the table waiting to be listed for sale.
Will PM you.I will buy the slab mold if you ate selling it
Thank you for your reply. Yeah, I figured microwave would be dangerous. If I need to wait for it to warm up in a bowl of water then I can just as easily wait for it to cool down if I make it fresh.
No because even though my hard oils/butters don’t resolidify because of the soft oils, I still have to remelt them. They usually come out of the microwave at about 110-120F and warm up the lye.
Don't microwave the lye. It will make a mess in your microwave and possibly melt the container.
I will give that a go with a small batch and see how it goes. Thank you
I master batch my lye also. I do a 1:1 master batch. So say I start out with 1000 grams of water, I add a 1000 grams of NaOH. When I make my soap, I usually use a 2:1 water to lye ratio (33% lye solution). So I need to add one more part water to my master batched lye solution. To that part of water, I add my sugar (I use powdered) and salt. Sometimes I’ll change it up and use milk instead of water, but you can still add additional sugar to the milk. I hope this makes sense. You still add liquid to your lye solution, so it’s easy to use master batching.
Wow! I'm curious, what percentage of beeswax were you using?
Part of the reason I hesitate to do markets. I cant handle the cold.
I love those! So clever!
I used 1 oz of beeswax for 7lbs of soap. Which was under what was called for in a brambleberry recipe I saw online for making beeswax soap. The BB recipe called for 2.8 oz beeswax for a 10oz mold. I only did one stick blend of 2 seconds after I poured the lye as I had already stick blended the wax, oils, and fragrance. The colors I added were nurture colors that have never caused seizing before. The temp of the oils was around 170 because with beeswax you have to soap at higher temps so I knew I'd have to move fast but never have I had a soap on a stick like that. I unmolded it this morning but the blue layer is still soft so I'm going to let it sit for a bit before I cut it. The fragrance held up to me cooking it and when I cleaned up the pots this morning the hardened soap is quite lovely. I do like HP soap but it always darkens the colors when you HP it so it won't work for this customer but I'm sure other people will like it. The fragrance is orange, honey, cinnamon, nutmeg, frankincense, and a eucalyptus which sounds like it would be horrible but it's actually pretty nice. I never would have put those scent combinations together on my own.
