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I use a stainless bowl to mix my lye in and pyrex to put remeasured ingredients into prior to making the soap. These all go into the dishwasher once done and I do use them for cooking. However, anything plastic or silicon use in the soap making only gets used for soap making. This is just me...

I have two digital scales. I use a micro scale (AWS 250) for weights up to 250 gr. that I use for weighing lye, EO, FO, or other smaller ingredients, and a normal kitchen scale for the oils. I place cling wrap over both scales when using them with soap making since it keeps them a bit cleaner...

How much citric acid do you add?

I used Neem Oil at 5% in my dog shampoo and 8% in my pine tar. You cannot really smell the Neem in either one. Of course, with enough pine tar you could hide a great deal of dead bodies so that is probably not a good example.

Sounds wonderful. How do you process the aloe from the plant to soap ready? Do you freeze the aloe or do you need to? Do you replace an equal amount of water with the aloe in the lye?

Based upon the experience of a number of other soapers, including Soaping101's video, I used Bickmore in mine. I could not find it locally in the Washington DC area. I suppose I could have headed west to horse country and found it, but chose to just order it from Amazon. Too easy to have it...

As a follow on to my results on the Lard, Neem and Pine Tar soap - I tried the first bar out after 30 days. It felt nice, although all you could smell was the pine tar. Now it has been 46 days and when using the soap in the shower I actually can smell the EO's in it. It is still abundantly clear...

When I made Castile I used the Costco Pure Olive Oil. After reading much about making it, I used a 1:1 water to lye ratio. It took forever to trace. I actually burned out my cheap stick blender trying to get it to trace. However, once it traced and I put it into the loaf mold, it was almost too...

For holidays I usually make my own butter. I take a quart of heavy cream and whip it in my stand blender. First it makes whipped cream and you keep whipping it and it eventually becomes butter with a thin liquid milk (the butter milk) that precipitates out. Usually around 10-15 minutes of...

You have to be very careful when using EO's anytime. Many EO's can be used by pets or humans in moderation but if taken internally, or rubbed on the skin directly can prove to be harmful. For example, Bergamot is a photosensitizer; Clove is a skin irritant. Neither of these oils should be used...

Here is the soap recipe I used. I decided to add Neem Oil since it is great for a dog's sensitive skin as well as a natural repellant for fleas and ticks. I have not used it yet but it has cured enough now that the next warm day our dog will get to try it. The EO is a total of 2.1 oz which put...

Actually, when you get it wet an rub it between your hands a minute, it becomes smooth. I use it in the shower. Love it. I find it is less exfoliating than oatmeal. Just my two cents.

The one thing I learned on the salt bar is when I did the replacement of oil with salt, I used the weights in ounces. However since salt (in a given volume) weights so much more that oil, I ended up with a smaller batch in volume than I wanted. Correct weights, but did not fill up the mold. The...

Thanks for the complements. We are not selling soaps. My husband and I started making bars for Xmas gifts and personal use. We really enjoy it. Everyone we know will be getting soap for the holidays this year. The salt was coarse grind. The stamp came from Soap Impressions. I sent the the design...

This is what my salt bar looks like after 84 days of curing. It was made with Black Sea salt as well as white sea salt with French Green Clay added for color. The Black salt really makes it look like granite when it is being used. The reflection is caused by the shrink wrap.

I used Hawaiian Black Salt in one of my recipes. I mixed it with standard coarse sea salt. I added French Green Clay for additional color and it looked and felt great. The black sea salt, which is actually sea salt and activated charcoal, gave a very textured look to the green soap.

Thanks Hazel!

For what it is worth, the only point I found on shelf life was a reference that popped up on Google from "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Making Natural Soaps" and it said the shelf life was a year and it needed to be kept refrigerated.

Some of us will be diving into using Ostrich oils in CP shortly and wondered if anyone had previous experiences or recipe ideas to share. There aren't many links to recipes otter than ones that state it is very similar to Emu oil, but better. So all ideas are welcome to this experiment...

Done!