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Bronze, yellow-green, accelerated, or not, I'd use that. Gorgeous!

Welcome to the lard side. We have cookies...with actual flavor. That recipe looks great, and it's similar to my go-to recipe using lard. I think you'll make a great soap with that!

I have one of those wee food processors with a simple blade--it can't take a shredder, unfortunately. I suppose I could ask for a bigger food processor, but given that I'd use it to make laundry soap, I'm thinking the Salad Shooter is more generally useful. I live on vegetables anyway, and I'm...

Alas, I'm unlikely to change. And socks won't appear again, post Christmas, I'm DTS (Down To Sock) for a long time. I was thinking of going wild this year and asking for--gasp--one of those wooden back scratchers. I suppose maybe I could use some underwear, too. :-)

I'm extremely hard to buy for. Extraordinarily so, in fact--I don't care about clothes, I just don't wear worn or ripped things to work. Of course, I make my own soap products, but I also make my own garden fertilizer, plus most other things that I can figure out. Which is most basic stuff...

I did try the cheese grater and now the laundry soap has tasted blood. I was worried it would go feral. Fortunately, it's only for our own use, so I very carefully didn't mention that fact and just kept going. :-) But talk about tedious. A Salad Shooter, for just this purpose, is on my list...

It would depend on what attracted me to the soap. If the design were particularly nice, I'd probably ask if they would mind sharing how they did that (with the understanding that, as a vendor, they very much might mind!). Particularly attractive colors might get me to ask what they used...

Well, not a disaster, per se, but hopefully somebody can learn from this. Two weeks ago, I made laundry soap--60% palm, 40% coconut, 0.5% super fat, 25% water. As expected, it came together fast and I unmolded the next day, then cut the bars into seven or eight pieces each with the intent...

I have the musical theme from "The Blob" going through my head here. The 1950's version.

Wide watercolor paintbrushes work as well and don't come with the "I'm buying a blush brush" stigma. Just sayin'. I'm actually a fan of somewhat less regular glitter/top color (or bottom color) on soap, so I tend to sprinkle. Heavier done sections just glitter more. I've even used glitter as...

I'd probably use a very white base with a graceful and trim blue swirl in it (if using a lighter blue, you could do it the other way around). Blue and white are very airy colors to me, like blue sky and white cloud. For shape, a circle or an oval. Something flowing, without edges when you...

Partial gel's weird look often fades during cure, so I wouldn't give up on it quite yet. Some of mine that were pronounced became a lot less so after four weeks!

Nope, I've had some that did, some that didn't, and some that partially gelled and got an interesting oval in the center through the loaf of gelled soap surrounded by ungelled. Putting the soap in the fridge helps keep the temperature down, stopping it from gelling. The freezer does the same...

There's always an up side! Try it at no more than 15%, 20% absolute maximum. I did a soap with 50% once and it wasn't exactly my best effort. Spare lather, waxy look and feel, but the stuff is almost immortal in the shower.

Technically, it's the emollient content, or the stuff left behind that slows water evaporation and makes skin feel soft. Functionally, in a wash off product, I can't say I pay very much attention to the conditioning number. Instead, I keep cleansing lower to avoid stripping oils from the...

Assuming everything's measured by weight (which we usually do), yep! Enter it into SoapCalc as 33.333%, though, not 33%. Those extra decimals matter. Or if you use a 2:1 water:lye ratio, then it works out exactly the way you'd think it would. So yes, if you master batch at 2:1 and use...

33%. Which would be another bad mistake to make in a recipe. :-) A 25% solution would be 1:3, or one quarter of the solution is lye.

With all the talk of math challenged, it brings up a good point. I'm not math challenged in the slightest. But y'know what? Everybody makes mistakes. That formula would've gone off perfectly if you remembered that your lye solution was 50% diluted. Oops. It's fixable. We all do that kind...

Rebatch! There's no need to ditch the soap, just HP-rebatch the thing and double the lye. 20% is the normal maximum, and only with coconut since it's incredibly stable. For other oils, 10% is the absolute maximum, with 5-8% being the normal maximum.

Yes, but make sure that it really is pure soy wax. EcoSoya makes one that is, but I'll be durned if I can remember which one off the top of my head right now.