Newbie Here! Hello! :-)

[dragonblossom]

New Member Says Hello!

You know how new I am? I posted my Intro Thread in the wrong forum, lol. Here's a link to it:

admin edit: deleted link - both threads have been merged and are in this topic.



Please feel free to answer any of the questions I posted there. As I now am very close to doing my first creation I thought I'd post to the Forums as a whole.

I'm going to work on Cold Process soap making. 99% of my materials are gathered. I just need to buy a filter for my britta pitcher so I can use filtered water (as buying distilled water seems like it would get expensive fast!)

Here's what I've bought to use in making my first soap:

Olive oil (pomace grade)
coconut oil
safflower oil
Cedarwood EO
Lemongrass EO
and of course Sodium Hydroxide!

I have a recipe I'm going to be basing my first soap off of. It comes from Natural Soapmaking by Elizabeth Letcavage. I say based off of because I plan to use a soap calc to run the numbers (I've read lots of people suggesting I do this.) I was playing with the calc this morning and one said that if I do 24 oz. of oils that it would make 1.5 lbs. of soap. Is that good for a first run? How many bars of soap would that make? I know it probably depends on the mold I put the soap in, but I'm going to try to make 3oz. bars.

Using this soap calc: http://www.maplesprings.com/soapcalc.html

Olive Oil 8oz.
Coconut Oil 8oz.
Safflower Oil 8oz.

At 5% superfat it says I should use 3.46 oz. lye
8.9 oz. water
1.1 oz. EOs

Does that ring true?

Thank you for stopping by!

 

[lsg]

Welcome to the forum. Your recipe looks pretty good to me. With the olive oil it may take a little longer to get hard, but you should have a nice bar of soap.

 

[JaimeM]

Hi dragonblossom!
Your recipe looks like it would make 9 bars to me (but I'm new too, so maybe someone else will have a more scientific answer addressing water evaporation during curing).
And I get gallon jugs of distilled water for a buck at the grocery store - I've made about 50 pounds of soap so far and I'm still only halfway through my second jug. So far the water is my cheapest supply (and filters for my Britta pitcher are pricey in my area! Lol!!)

 

[dragonblossom]

Isg > Do you think if I lowered the amount of OO and upped one of the other two that would help make the soap harden faster? ( at work so I can't check my book for oil properties, but I will when I get home.) Thanks for the tip!

Jamie> Hmm...I may just do distilled water then! 9 bars, I may adjust it then I'd like to make a batch closer to 15 or twenty.

Thank you both! ^_^

 

[savonierre]

Hi ragonblood welcome to the forum. ( not lsg) but the 2 oils are considered soft oils, the CO is a "hard" oil, if you could add some palm oil or removed the safflower and upped the OO, you would have a very hard bar of soap in time.

 

[dragonblossom]

Thanks savonierre! I'll look into that.