# Introduction:  My name is Silmaryll - Part 1



## Silmaryll (Jan 2, 2015)

Hello all,

Introductions always feel a little awkward, but I have blogged in the past and every blog post felt like an initial introduction of myself.  But, as you can see by the length of my initial introductory post here, I'm no stranger to writing, and I do enjoy it.  

While my profession has been thus far in Information Technology, specifically in deploying Windows environments to large-scale corporate networks, I switched to Web Design last year, as well as re-discovering Gardening.  The reason for the switch was mostly due to a health condition or two I contrived that hindered me from performing the duties I had done for years, except taking care of home-user computer issues.  Gardening became a creative outlet for me, and helped me get some motivation back while undergoing medical procedures.  It was actually Gardening research I was doing that led me to soap making and trying it out.  I was hooked from the word go!  I am in the process of designing both my website and new blog, the blog to be about my 'adventures' in Gardening and Soap Making.

I have come across this forum many, many, many times in my research.  Today, I finally decided to join.

While I don't have any current burning questions, let me list out what I have done thus far.

While I was hooked on the idea of making soap, and getting all the supplies to do so, I did want to be careful not to just throw myself to the public-wolves.  So August-September is when I had everything together and started making recipes for family and friends for Christmas.  

My first 2 batches were a Warm Vanilla Sugar batch made with Coconut oil, Olive, Palm, and Sunflower Oil.  I used the Bramble Berry calculator as well as the Summer Bee Meadow calc then.  Well, that soap NEVER set up, and still to this day I can squish my fingers through it (yes, I saved it to rebatch later).  I made that back in late September...like right around Labor Day, I think.  

I made batch #2 a Pumpkin Spice with CO, OO, PO, and Castor Oil.  That should have been fine, but the calculators I was using called for too much lye and I didn't know any better.  Actually, since I wasn't too familiar with zap-testing or what that felt like (I didn't lick a whole lot of 9+V batteries growing up, I guess I was sheltered, lol), I just took a small end-piece into the shower with me and did my morning thing.  Holy Crap!  I burned in places not to be mentioned here!  :-O  Not badly, but enough to walk and move funny for about an hour.  So, that's how I found out I had too much lye in that soap and I needed now to redo both recipes.

It was then I had joined a couple forums on Facebook, and the members were extremely ueber helpful in explaining first to me that I need to use SoapCalc!  I can use Summer Bee Meadow to resize to any mold I want, but use SoapCalc first!  I immediately converted!  They also enlightened me to my possible problems with those 2 batches, further confirming I could rebatch them later (which at the time, I had no clue what rebatching was).

My next recipes were complete success!  I re-did the Warm Vanilla Sugar one and the Pumpkin Spice, and proceeded to make a Castille with Patchouli and Orange EO's (not FO's), then a White Tea & Ginger made from CO, OO, Crisco, Sunflower, Castor, and Palm which turned out this beautiful white!  I'm sorry I didn't take pictures before I sent them all out (more on that later).  I also made a Shaving soap from CO, OO, Sunflower, Castor, Crisco, Palm, and Shea Butter. and another Castille Soap unscented.  

Shortly after I ran out of all supplies is when I tried my hand at rebatching, like the people in the forum suggested I do with my 2 failed recipes.  But being that the 2 failed recipes seemed quite large to me to use as my "test bed", I gathered all kinds of soap scraps I had saved for a couple months around the house, plus soap scraps from "cleaning" (with a potato peeler) my newer soaps that were curing.  The method I initially tried rebatching with was the plastic baggie method from Bramble Berry, being that these batches were quite small.  I used used silicone cupcake molds I had bought at Goodwill as my molds for them.  They turned out quite good, while a little too rustic looking for my own and my boyfriend's taste (though he was polite about it).  It was then I invested in another crockpot specifically for rebatching (I don't like mixing soap ingredients in containers I cook food in....maybe that's just me).

Thank Goodness I took pictures and posted on Facebook when I initially made soaps, because otherwise I wouldn't have had a date as to when the CP soaps were actually ready for use!  I went back and labelled everything, and all the "ready" dates were 12/19-12/20/2014.  I didn't want to literally "hurt" my family and friends with my enthusiastic creations!  Well, it was 12/18 and I was literally JUST getting over a horrendous case of pneumonia I'd contrived (thank you, Mr. Boyfriend, for bringing that home from work....I hadn't been THAT sick since 2004!), and I needed to get all these Christmas presents in the mail ASAP!  I live in MO and everyone else is so spread out now between FL and CA, that driving presents somewhere was not an option.  I had to come up with packaging on the fly...which is when I realized just how important the visual presentation of soap packaging is!  For all the round soaps, I used 2" round Avery Labels that I designed up (took up 1/2 day at least), and I cut out colored tissue paper the size of coffee filters (which I almost used, but didn't like the presentation) that I folded around the soap in a fan-like fashion and then stuck the label on.  For the Warm Vanilla Sugar soaps I tried to create a bakery-style wrapping around them to show off the Copper Sparkle Mica covering the top of these wonderful smelling dark brown bars (which initially, I had no clue that Vanilla FO would cause CP soap to turn brown...what a surprise, but the peeps over on FB assured me this is normal...and it looked pretty with the Mica).  I used brown packaging paper, cut out a rectangle size, cut out a window in the middle to show off the Mica part of the soap, wrapped it Christmas/Birthday package style, and taped it together with one of the 2" round Avery Labels I made.  Most of them came out cute!  Some of them shifted too much while wrapping, making the window I created look crooked.
I had asked Mr. Boyfriend for help packaging, but he bailed.  Had I had his help, I would have gotten the packages out sooner.  I literally got all my packages out last minute, 15 of them for approximately 30-35 people, on the morning of Dec 21.  Half the people got their packages on Dec 23, and the other half on Dec 26.  Not too bad.  But 3 days of packaging and gift-wrapping did me in.  I think I didn't budge from my WoW game for 2 days other than to cook Christmas dinner and do our presents here at home!

I didn't realize the amount of soap I really sent out until I had packaged all these up and sent them out.  I was literally left with 3 bars of shaving soap that were "runts"...that's it.  None for me.  

But the feedback I got was just absolutely out of this world insanely positive!!!  I now have family, friends, and neighbors texting me and messaging me online asking when I am making more!  I have 9 more recipes planned that I just bought supplies for.

After trying to post what I wanted, the forum told me my post was TL;DR.  So instead of obeying and editing, I will make a continued post next.


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## Silmaryll (Jan 2, 2015)

*Introduction:  My name is Silmaryll - Part 2*

Sorta sorry I'm writing so much, but I didn't feel like editing the 998 characters I was over in my initial post.

I will say this after trying out slivers of my soap before and after they were cured.  They had great lather, my skin felt 100% better than a Lever 2000 bar (see-ya-later dry skin!), smelled awesome, but they were a bit hard and the bubbles were quite small.  
Ok I guess, but not what I was looking for exactly.  
Which made me go through SoapCalc once again to revamp my recipes once again.  My bar hardness was around a 46-51%.  Conditioning was in there, but at the same percentages, bubbly and creamy could have been boosted from the high 20's-very low 30's %.  So I have now settled on a (average) 42% hardness, 54% Conditioning, 36% bubbly, and 34% creaminess.  

According to the recommended values on SoapCalc, these are middle-of-the-road values I think I can happily live with and should give the final "master batch" results I want, so now I've recalc'd all of my recipes to approximately meet these values with a "master batch" soap recipe of CO, OO, Sunflower, Castor, Palm, PKF, and Walmart GV Shortening with tallow.

The OTHER THING I am changing in most of my recipes is changing from water to powdered Goat's Milk (except for Castille...I'm going for condensed Coconut Milk there).  Now, I have been reading what feels like FOR-EV-ER on Goat Milk in CP and all the different processes.  I have never tried it, but think I might be fine.  I will be taking 1/2 cup of the total water solution out to specifically mix the total amount of GM to go in, chilling it in the fridge while I process everything else, then add the GM at light trace before FO's or colors.  

What I am doing with my 2 failed recipes, obviously, is rebatch them.  I will be grating them down fine in the next day or 2...first with a hand grater (which is probably all the vanilla soap will handle, if even that, as it is soft).  Then with a food processor I've acquired just for rebatching.  Just to make sure it's nice and fine textured.  Then I will be soaking the total amount (4 lbs 56oz) of both those soaps in 9 oz Goats Milk overnight in the crockpot.  In the morning, I will turn the crockpot on and let it melt down.  What I noticed in my last rebatch "test bed" is that rebatch feels FAR better with milk than it does with water!!!  Also dissolves smoother.  What I discovered is that the amount of lye missing in the vanilla soap is contained by too much in the pumpkin soap, which should balance eachother out.  The problem with both is lather, which the GM, adding Honey and Sugar, should fix.  I am immediately carrying the mold outside on bricks to cool and not gel, as I've seen horror stories about volcanoes happening with GM, Honey, and Sugar.  The soap is already brown, so I'm not worried about coloring.  AS THIS REBATCH IS SITTING OUTSIDE, I will be preparing a GM CP unscented to go on top of it.  As soon as that is at trace, I am bringing the mold back inside, adding the GM CP to the top, then back outside on top of the bricks the mold goes (it's about 17*-34* on average here in St. Louis area right now).  Because it's GM CP being added to the top, I'm actually letting this cure for 8 weeks.

I have so much more to tell about what I'm soaping up shortly, but I feel I've created a TL;TR book already (TLTR = too long to read).

So thank you for having me in the forum.  Thank you for reading.  Thank you for whatever responses come my way...any and all are definitely welcome.  And any curiosity I've piqued about what I did or didn't do, I'll be glad to answer and take advice graciously.  I look forward to responses.  


PS:  And...Yes, my handle is a J.R.R. Tolkien reference.  My fav author since I was 14, and I am now 47 with 25 and 27 yr old sons.


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## CaraBou (Jan 2, 2015)

Welcome, Silmaryll!  Looks like you've been bitten, hard!  Well, you're in good company here.  

I have good news for you.  You don't need to worry about volcanoes or creeping with your rebatch, or overheating.  You aren't working with a lye solution, and the soap has already saponified, so it just won't happen. You said there was extra lye in the one batch, but have you tongue tested it lately?  It might be gone by now.  Often times, lye heavy soap will take care of itself if given enough time.  And that leads me to a question:  how long had the soap been curing when it burned you?  Was it pretty young?  The lye calculators you used shouldn't be that far off, and they should produce safe soap, so it could just be that the soap hadn't finished saponifying when you tried it in the shower.


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## Susie (Jan 2, 2015)

Hey and welcome!

I have one suggestion for you.  You need to print out your recipes and put the date on them with all changes you make.  Then save those in a binder or put it into the computer.  This will prove an invaluable resource for you!  I make a card and stick it into the basket with the soap with the name and date it was made.  That way I know when it is cured.


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## snappyllama (Jan 2, 2015)

Howdy and welcome!  Since you're a computer nerd (like me), you'll probably like using Evernote to keep track of you recipes. I swear by it for soaping and other projects around the house.


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## lsg (Jan 2, 2015)

Welcome to the forum from another Missourian.  I have a grater blade that I use with an old food processor.  It is so much easier than hand grating.


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## Silmaryll (Jan 2, 2015)

CaraBou said:


> Welcome, Silmaryll! Looks like you've been bitten, hard! Well, you're in good company here.
> 
> I have good news for you. You don't need to worry about volcanoes or creeping with your rebatch, or overheating. You aren't working with a lye solution, and the soap has already saponified, so it just won't happen. You said there was extra lye in the one batch, but have you tongue tested it lately? It might be gone by now. Often times, lye heavy soap will take care of itself if given enough time. And that leads me to a question: how long had the soap been curing when it burned you? Was it pretty young? The lye calculators you used shouldn't be that far off, and they should produce safe soap, so it could just be that the soap hadn't finished saponifying when you tried it in the shower.



Hi there, CaraBou, and thank you for the 1st warm welcome! Yes, I was bitten pretty hard. haha

That certainly makes sense with the creeping and volcanoes not happening with a rebatch. Right after you posted this last night, boyfriend and I were up babysitting a batch of beer he was making, so I recruited him to come do a zap test with me. And you know what? No zap. I'm actually disappointed. The soap does sting if you have a cut or scratch on your hand, but didn't have any zap whatsoever. 

The Vanilla one that is too soft was too much water, 13.81 oz, and not enough lye. The old recipe was 
Coconut Oil - 5.45oz (15%)
Olive Oil - 12.72oz (35%)
Palm Oil - 12.72oz (35%)
Sunflower Oil - 5.45oz (15%)
Lye - 5oz
Water - 13.81oz - as % of oil weight at 38% (default) and SF at 5% (default)
Fragrance - 1.14oz (0.5%)

The new (more successful) recipe was:
Coconut Oil - 12.72oz (35%)
Crisco - 9.09oz (25%)
Olive Oil - 12.72oz (35%)
Sunflower Oil - 1.82oz (5%)
Castor Oil - 1.82oz (5%)
Shea Butter - 5.45oz (15%)
Lye - 5.21oz
Water - 11.99oz
Fragrance - 1.14oz (0.5%)
This recipe was a workaround since I had run out of Palm Oil, but had Shea Butter on-hand. Water was discounted at 33% and SF at 5%

The old recipe (that I got off the internet somewhere) is what I have on-hand still and is still mushy.

On the pumpkin-spice with too much lye, the old recipe was:
Coconut Oil - 11.13oz (31.99%)
Olive Oil - 11.13oz (31.99%)
Palm Oil - 11.13oz (31.99%)
Castor Oil - 1.40oz (4.02%)
Lye - 5.04oz
Water - 12.87oz - 37% of oil weight (though not listed in the recipe, this is what I got to match the amounts in the recipe on SoapCalc) and SF at 5%.
Fragrance - 1.14oz (0.5%)

I seem to have accidentally thrown out the new recipe calculations :/ , but my hand-written notes on the *old recipe* say that the old recipe in comparison to the new recipe was 1.11oz of less water difference on the old, 2.21oz increased difference in Lye on the old, and 0.25oz increased difference in FO on the old. Also, in the old recipe I had discounted water for Pumpkin Puree (further decreasing water), whereas in the new recipe, I did not discount the water but still added the Pumpkin Puree (2.09oz in both recipes). 
The old recipe is what ate up most of my palm oil (especially after doing this recipe twice, and not yet knowing at the time how to balance the oils correctly). The new recipe didn't sting at all when I used it in the shower, whereas the old one did. The new recipe performed the ITPS absolutely beautifully and the trace was almost perfect after letting lye/water and oils cool down to ca. 100* each, whereas the 1st recipe came to trace too quickly due to soaping too hot at 115*.

So seeing my notes and feeling the differences between the 2 pumpkin soaps, the lack of water in the first recipe could not balance the amount of lye used. They are also sitting down in my basement as NHL Hockey Pucks (Go Blues!  ) Like I said, I did zap test them last night. No Zap. *Should I add a little lye to the Rebatch now that I know this?*



Susie said:


> Hey and welcome!
> 
> I have one suggestion for you. You need to print out your recipes and put the date on them with all changes you make. Then save those in a binder or put it into the computer. This will prove an invaluable resource for you! I make a card and stick it into the basket with the soap with the name and date it was made. That way I know when it is cured.



Hi Susie, and thank you for your welcome!

I have printed out every recipe I've done in a calculator, but bookmarked every recipe I've tried that initially came from someone else as I tried soaping for the first time. I keep my printouts in a folder and filed in my desk. When I initially realized that I needed to know the creation date so that I could calculate the cure-finish date, I went into my timeline on Facebook, which did give me the creation date, wrote it on a sticky note along with the cure-finish date, and labelled each batch of soap I made thereafter. I would not have been able to do the guessing game! Thank you, Facebook timelines! From there on forward, each batch gets a sticky-note with its creation and cure-finish dates.



snappyllama said:


> Howdy and welcome! Since you're a computer nerd (like me), you'll probably like using Evernote to keep track of you recipes. I swear by it for soaping and other projects around the house.



Hey there, snappyllama! Thanks for the welcome! Always glad to be in the company of nerds! 
You sound like a MAC person, with your EverNote. While I have used it here and there, and now have it on my new Android Tablet I got for Christmas, I haven't kept track of soaping in it. What I have been doing instead is a mix of printouts of SoapCalc that I take with me to the kitchen for reference while I soap, then later file, and I keep track in Microsoft OneNote on my Windows/Linux computer as well. I also use OneNote for Gardening projects and DIY building projects I do, as well as my new business planning tool (as it helps me keep all my projects sorted in different "notebooks" all in one place, that I can also access off my iPhone and Android Tablet.



lsg said:


> Welcome to the forum from another Missourian. I have a grater blade that I use with an old food processor. It is so much easier than hand grating.



Thank you, LSG! Appreciate the welcome! Really glad to see another Missourian on here....though I am not originally from here. Just moved here 3-1/2 years ago from the East Coast (Florida, then New Jersey, then Washington, D.C., then Ohio, then here to Missouri). I love that MO has all 4 seasons, I've become a Tornado Tracker who alerts others on Facebook/Google+ as they pass through the state, and have come to hate the clay soil. I see now why most people in St. Louis area do raised garden beds! And MO has some of the best wines out there in Wine Country that I have ever tasted! TONS of creative people here in the St. Louis area too...totally LOVING that!

You don't find the top of the food processor lid a PITA to clean when you use the grater blade? That was my only drawback when I did that with the test-bed rebatches I made and did the same thing. Chunks of soap would get caught on the top of the lid and I'd have to dig them out with a knife. But since then I got a different food processor (used), so am looking forward to utilizing that one for my next rebatch. My alternative, if the soap got caught on the top of the food processor and took more than 1/2 hr to clean again, was to sit in front of "Rehab Addict" on DIY Network (TV) and hand-grate.


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## IrishLass (Jan 2, 2015)

Welcome Silmaryll! :wave: I've loved JRR Tolkien since I was about 15 myself. 

I just typed your first two recipes using your given ounce measurements into SoapCalc just to doublecheck things.

For your first recipe, which you term as being your 'old recipe', yep- it was high on the water amount (at least more water than I like to use), but your lye amount was actually very good. I'm not sure why you thought it did not have enough lye? Maybe because it came out too soft? If so, then the problem wasn't the amount of lye, but actually the excess water. 

Re: the 'new (more successful) recipe': hmmm.... I'm not exactly sure where the problem lies, but I'm getting completely different results when entering in the ounce measurements into Soapcalc that you posted. When typing in your amounts, I come up with these instead of the percents you posted:

29.16% coconut oil (76 deg.)
20.84% Crisco (I clicked on the 'New Crisco' as opposed the the 'Old Crisco)
29.16% olive oil (as opposed to pomace)
4.17% Sunflower (regular as opposed to the HO type)
4.17% Castor
12.49 Shea Butter (as opposed to shea oil)

...and with a 5% superfat that you said it contained, the calculator is showing me an amount of 6.16 oz lye for 5% S/F instead of the 5.21 oz. you posted. If I play around with things to get the lye amount down to 5.21 oz, SoapCalc says this recipe is actually superfatted at 19.6% instead of 5%.

And I also had to play around to get the amount of 11.99 oz. of water that you posted, which gave me a figure of 30.3% lye to water solution, or a 27.47% water as % of oils for your recipe.

Is it possible you made a typo somewhere or maybe clicked on a different type of oil/fat?


IrishLass


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## Silmaryll (Jan 2, 2015)

Hi there, IrishLass! Thanks for the welcome and I'm definitely glad to meet another Tolkien fan, like myself! 

I am going to take a picture of the soapcalc sheets (both old and new for Vanilla) and post them here (since I've already been explaining that soap here).


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## KristaY (Jan 2, 2015)

Hello Silmaryll and welcome from Arizona! :wave:


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## Silmaryll (Jan 3, 2015)

Hello KristaY! Thanks for the welcome! :wave:

Ok, so here I am attaching pics of my printed SoapCalc recipes that I am planning on rebatching. I am actually waiting on responses from all of you before I proceed, as you are much more knowledgeable in this area than I.

I have the titles of each written (or printed) on each recipe, so it is distinguishable between new and old.

Yes, I see a lye difference between the old and new Vanilla one, but not by much. The reason I posted the pictures of these printouts was to show the measurements SoapCalc came up with in contrast to the measurements IrishLass came up with as results from SoapCalc. I figured if I shared the printout there wouldn't be confusion on the values entered and resulting. Hope that helps some.

Since I didn't have zap last night, and I am rebatching the soft Vanilla with the hard Pumpkin (also attached that recipe), that maybe I need to actually add lye to the rebatch instead. This is the question that is holding me back from proceeding until I hear more from all of you.

Thanks again for looking, ladies and gents. I truly appreciate the input, and it has been definitely a learning experiment.

*Old Vanilla-Sugar recipe that is too soft*




*New Vanilla-Sugar Recipe that succeeded and went out for Christmas*




Old Pumpkin-Spice recipe that felt lye-heavy (stings skin)




*Combined Old Vanilla & Pumpkin recipes to analyze issues and to rebatch together:*






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## IrishLass (Jan 3, 2015)

Thanks for posting those Simaryll! That helps tremendously! 

Ahhh, I now see why I kept getting different results on SoapCalc as compared to yours in regard to your new, more successful recipe. The oil amounts that you had posted in your previous thread for that particular recipe were different than the amounts that you had actually entered into SoapCalc, according to your pictured printout. Whew! I'm so glad I'm not going crazy! I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone for a minute there, or that SoapCalc suddenly started hating me. lol

I will go back to your first post to study what went wrong with your first soap containing the pumpkin, as I'm still not sure why you consider that particular recipe to be 'oil heavy' and need more lye. 

Hopefully more people will chime in during the meantime.

IrishLass


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## Silmaryll (Jan 3, 2015)

So glad that clarified things, IrishLass. Sometimes I'm multi-tasking and miss a typo, and pictures can say 1000 words faster. 

It is actually the 1st Vanilla soap I considered to be oil heavy. One soaper on here kinda changed my opinion on that stance though. Said that it was actually water heavy. In looking at the recipe, they are certainly correct. The soap is still *mushy* after making it back in the last week of September 2014.


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## shunt2011 (Jan 3, 2015)

Hello and welcome to the forum and the addiction!


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