TrishNZ
Well-Known Member
Is there a calculator that you can input the oils you have on hand and comes up with a recipe to use? Say for CP shower soap?
Calculator with multiple oils
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Kittish
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This Soap Queen blog lists a lot of the properties that various oils will bring to your soap. I'm using information from that and that I've found here as a general guide to building recipes.
TrishNZ
Well-Known Member
Thank you...its hard as a newbie...negotiating all these links, comments and trying to understand etc (and sometimes being told off for commenting on something too old)
If in doubt, create a new thread and put in a link to the older one, especially if the thread has been inactive for a year or so.
The trouble with your original aim is that there are so many right answers and so many wrong ones. You have some coconut, some olive and some palm - you could make so many variations with that!
I would suggest reading back through the posts in the Beginners, Lye-based, Soap Making recipes, and Recipe feedback threads. 10 pages in each, looking particularly at anything related to recipe feedback or oil choices.
It's far better to understand more about how and why certain things happen with certain oil mixes than to have a website give you a suggestion. YOU can then start to look at creating recipes that fill your needs
penelopejane
Well-Known Member
not that i know of but this is a great site and she has excellent videos too:
http://www.soaping101.com/soap-recipes.html
gloopygloop
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I agree soaping 101 is very good for a lot of info and methods as is this wonderful forum, and also http://www.millersoap.com this is somewhat dated now I think but i started with it a thousand years ago and learned a lot as there wasn't so much information around then, there is a lot of easily explained information for the beginner you can then keep moving on.
You can search this link using one oil at a time and the results are recipes using that particular oil. I can't say if they are necessarily good recipes, but it's the only site like that I have found.
Another possibility is to do a Google (or other search engine) search using the words, 'soap recipe' and then list a couple of the oils you have on hand, then click the 'search' button. Some recipes will turn up with a Google search as well.
Always run it through a lye calculator if you find one you want to try. And if the recipe you find gives volume measurements (some do), then make sure you actually use weights and do your measuring on a good digital scale.
artemis
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I am not a person for reading all of the instructions on anything, so I tend to just jump in, even as an early soaper. When I had random oils in the house, I just put them all into the lye calculator, tinkered with the amounts and tried it in a small batch (usually 16oz of oils). It was fun, I learned technique, I learned about how the oils affected the soap, and even if it wasn't perfect, it was still soap.
I spend some time reading about properties of different oils in soap but it didn't really stick, ended up formulating according to what other people recommended, what the soap calculator told me when I was playing around there and what I've learned from my test soaps. So if you don't think you really learn what you need by reading about oils, don't do it. Go play in a soap calculator instead, chooses the oils you have on hand and change the ratios until the numbers are within range, if you want to you can then post the recipe here before making it and see if people think it's a good one, just to be sure.
