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Coconut pulp CO2 arrived today! It's mostly a solid lump in the bottle at the moment. When it warms up and goes back to liquid I'll dip a fragrance strip in and see how it smells OOB, then in a week or so I'll make a batch of soap with it. I figure on cutting at least a couple of the bars into...

I use EOs in my soaps, even the expensive stuff like jasmine and rose and patchouli. What people have said so far about which EOs stick is accurate. Patchouli sticks incredibly well, it'll still be around LONG after any other scent combined with it has faded. Only takes a LITTLE bit, too, it...

One recommendation I've seen for using clay is to mix it with water (JUST water, no lye) and let it hydrate before mixing it into your oils. Haven't tried it myself yet, so no personal experience.

Mine is really simple, and doesn't take any longer than using regular shampoo. I use baking soda in water to clean my hair. Rinse that out and follow with a rinse of diluted apple cider vinegar, then rinse that out as well. Done, and my hair is clean, soft, and mostly tangle-free.

I bought one that looks just like that recently, but haven't used it yet. I tried one with a metal blade and didn't like it at all.

Safer, yes, I'll grant (long as the products are made correctly). I feel much the same way. I don't have any light to shed on shampoo, I use an alternate method to clean my hair. Maybe someone else will come along with something, though, because now I'm curious, too.

I would go with whichever one is thinner out of the bottle, simply so it won't tend to gum up the roller.

I consider myself purely a hobbyist, and make stuff for my own use, as well as for friends and family. I wouldn't consider myself a health nut, but I have an allergy that sometimes challenging to cope with- I'm allergic to artificial fragrances. It can be tough to downright impossible to find...

Depends on how much of the tip I cut off, but as least as big as the hole at the top of the squeeze bottles I've got.

I have a small 1" thick bamboo cutting board that developed a split so I couldn't use it in the kitchen that I now use as soaping gear. Even with a thin batter, I don't get more than a drop or two of batter leaking if I set a piping bag down with the tip on the board and the body of the bag on...

I've been largely palm free since I started, and am getting good results with using shea and/or cocoa butters as my hard oils (and I have mango and kokum now as well, and will start using them and see how it goes), along with 15-25% coconut oil. I cure my bars for 8 weeks, and so far every one...

There

I prefer to use disposable piping bags. The one time I tried to use squeeze bottles, the top of the bottles came off a couple of times as the soap batter thickened. You can use ziploc baggies in much the same way, just snip off one corner.

The recipe you use for a soap will effect the curing time. Some soaps, like those very high in olive oil or salt bars, need longer curing times- up to a year in the case of pure olive oil soap (castile). Most recipes that have a balance of hard and soft oils need a 4 to 6 week cure, though even...

I would suggest that you keep one bar of your very first batch, shove it into a back corner of your curing space and forget about it for a few months. It may turn out to be wonderful soap if you just let it sit for a while, plus it's good to have a baseline on how your recipes act over time...

I made a BIG batch of shaving soap. 1000g of oils. I've got 18 bars of shaving soap sitting on my counter just now, in my new bar molds. I think it'll take a while to go through it all. Used the same recipe that I did for the first batch, from the Songwind thread, just lowered the coconut by 5%...

Feeding them is a REALLY bad idea, they'll eat whatever you've put out for them AND your soaps. Plus, it'll draw in even more of them, plus encourage them to breed as has been mentioned and next thing you know your basement is overrun with mice and they're invading the house as well. Oh, and...

I'm happy to report results. I've tried another oddball scent from Eden in the past few months, Green Cognac. Not quite sure how I feel about that one, it's mellowed into a sort of boozy apple with notes of hay. Seems to be sticking, though. I used it as the scent in my entry for the October...

Yep, syndet is synthetic detergent, and it actually sounds like you're on pretty much the right track for making decent shampoo bars. The method I use is one of the myriad 'no poo' types, I switched over to it long before I started making soap and related products because I could NOT find a...

First, welcome! Second, don't feel bad about how your soaps look! We LOVE to look at other people's soap, no matter what it looks like (and I'm pretty sure every single one of us has made a batch of ugly soap or three). My first batch was pretty hideous- stearic globs all through it from using...