What soapy thing have you done today?

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Beautiful!
Awww Thank you so much 🤗🧼💫

Today my soap thing is thanking all of you for sharing and teaching and showing kindness to all of us who love soapmaking and never had a clue about the giving process of it. I have learned so much and know that I can count on learning more without fear of ridicule or competitiveness. A rare thing now in our country. I really do love you all and hope that I can contribute in the same way as you have . Happy Thanksgiving fellow soap makers and have a wonderful soapy day!!!

Wishing you a Blessed Thanksgiving 🤗🍂🦃

Ps I don't remember how I got the recipe from email to here but am working on it.

I should have said zany requested above on not knowing how to highlight a name. I did also tell my daughter to use 33 lye concentration and that it was the second option under water percent but was doing it all through text while on deer stand and as mentioned earlier, just now is my first real experience using text. Not sure I like it.
Cheers
Gww
Ps still trying to figure out how to get texted pictures from text to here.

View attachment 62750
Ok, got it. I will leave all you good people alone now.
Gww
Awww adorable picture. Look's like our next generation of a great soaper. 🤗🧼💫.
 
Started labeling the soap to get ready to send to friends and family. I feel like I'm actually more organized this year getting the soap made and ready. How could that be??

I had a computer crash and lost basically all of my files from the last 2 years (no, I didn't back up and know better!). This included my soap label template. So, I started with the handwritten label and then bought a template that I tweaked.

I would also love to add my thanks to everyone on this group. I've become a much more competent soaper because of you. And I love checking in to see what everyone is up to. And I even entered my very first challenge this month!


tempImageDYBQmB.png
 
Started labeling the soap to get ready to send to friends and family. I feel like I'm actually more organized this year getting the soap made and ready. How could that be??

I had a computer crash and lost basically all of my files from the last 2 years (no, I didn't back up and know better!). This included my soap label template. So, I started with the handwritten label and then bought a template that I tweaked.

I would also love to add my thanks to everyone on this group. I've become a much more competent soaper because of you. And I love checking in to see what everyone is up to. And I even entered my very first challenge this month!


View attachment 62775
Loving the look of your packaged soaps!
And that green is beautiful. Can I ask, is it cucumber puree that gives it that light green colour?
 
Cut and beveled my latest soap. A HP soap I made with 4 wild butters: Ucuuba Butter, Murumuru Butter, Cupuacu Butter and Bacari Butter. I really loved making this - and I fragranced it with a mix of Kentucky Bourbon and Vermont Maple. View attachment 50924
I use a bar very similar to this but cold process. My customers favorite bar. Careful though it move FAST through trace haha.
 
TITRATION day 😵🤓💉📝

After witnessing some weird behaviour with making CPLS, I had the purity of my KOH under suspicion. The package says 85%. Eventually dusted burette and magnetic stirrer after a long time. The KOH turns out to be at 85.7% purity, so everything fine (and I'll have to search for errors elsewhere). Everything set up, I quickly tested my NaOH masterbatch too, and the “50%” are in fact 49.4%, i. e. my NaOH has 98.8% purity. Good to know, to estimate surprising superfat, etc.

Eventually, I celebrated this day with making a KOH masterbatch:
koh_masterbatch.jpg
The concentration 35.05% sounds random, but is purposely chosen. A 50% NaOH masterbatch has a hydroxide mass concentration of quite exactly 12.5 mol/kg solution. Now, this mass concentration is not possible to reach with KOH at room temperature (would be 70.1%). So I halved this number and went for 6.25 mol/kg hydroxide, which is said 35.05% KOH (or 40.9% impure KOH) – the same hydroxide concentration as a 25% NaOH solution.

For dual-lye soap, I can now replace each g NaOH masterbatch by 2 g of this KOH masterbatch, and don't even have to use the dual-lye capabilities of soap calculators.
 
😃
It might not be obvious from all the math included, but masterbatching a) only sounds complicated (but in fact isn't), and b) is all about laziness. It's just that different people prefer different types of laziness.

At some point when you're tired of weighing 162.2 g NaOH and hypnotically waiting for them to dissolve into 329.3 g of water and cool down again, you might reconsider masterbatching. One cannot trick Nature (“There ain't no such thing as a free lunch”), but one can choose how to distribute the work over the process steps.

(You can forget about the lye purity & KOH shenanigans as long as you're just keen on robust soap bars. A good part of what I've done today was for “because” reasons/paranoia.)
 
Just took advantage of the early Black Friday sale at NS. Now I’ll have to MAKE the time, and find the energy to make more soap! Cheers to a soapy 2022!!
And I did too. Now I’m sweating thinking how I’m going to balance my budget. :rolleyes:
Besides finding time to make the soaps, I’m going to first have to figure how to free up space to pack away my much anticipated stash.
Lots of appreciation to all the members who have offered recommendations on what to buy.
 
Merry Making Season to me! Just ordered an Electra press bath bomb press and a national shrink wrap system. I’ve been so tired getting back to my day job that I was sad that I didn’t have enough time or energy to make soap and body care as I had been. But, I’m committed to finding the balance! And, these tools should make it easier. Reinvesting what little I make from my soap biz, back into my soap biz. Excited for my new skill and passion! Just trying to recalibrate to being ok with not being able to soap all day every day.
 
Merry Making Season to me! Just ordered an Electra press bath bomb press and a national shrink wrap system. I’ve been so tired getting back to my day job that I was sad that I didn’t have enough time or energy to make soap and body care as I had been. But, I’m committed to finding the balance! And, these tools should make it easier. Reinvesting what little I make from my soap biz, back into my soap biz. Excited for my new skill and passion! Just trying to recalibrate to being ok with not being able to soap all day every day.
That’s great! I really like my National Shrinkwrap system although I am definitely not a pro with the heat gun.
 
That’s great! I really like my National Shrinkwrap system although I am definitely not a pro with the heat gun.
I just told my hubs yesterday that I guess the heat gun is a whole new art form. Because I’m sure not good at it! Hopefully I improve. I’ve been using the shrink wrap bags from amazon. Hoping this system is easier, and saves time. packaging is not my favorite.
 
Back the gun up.... most likely, you're too close.

That’s great! I really like my National Shrinkwrap system although I am definitely not a pro with the heat gun.
I just told my hubs yesterday that I guess the heat gun is a whole new art form. Because I’m sure not good at it! Hopefully I improve. I’ve been using the shrink wrap bags from amazon. Hoping this system is easier, and saves time. packaging is not my favorite.
 
I just told my hubs yesterday that I guess the heat gun is a whole new art form. Because I’m sure not good at it! Hopefully I improve. I’ve been using the shrink wrap bags from amazon. Hoping this system is easier, and saves time. packaging is not my favorite.
I’ve found that I ruin less wraps if I stack a few bars and heat the sides first from a safe distance (what that distance is seems to change with every swipe of the heat gun!) then un-stack and hit the top and bottom gently to tighten. I don’t blow out as many seams that way. Maybe they have a chance to cool and strengthen and the stack more evenly distributes the heat!?!?! Who knows but it works for me.
 
I made up a batch of conditioner bars to mail out with the shampoo bars for family members. This time, I heated everything in the microwave instead of a water bath. It was soooo much faster, plus I used less dishes, and the bars turned out perfectly. Yay!

EDIT: on a sad note, half of my previous lye masterbatch has a ginormous chunk of lye "ice" at the bottom. Not going to mess with trying to reheat it and reincorporate it. Oh well, my drains are going to be extra clean.
 
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