Please help!

[suzannevrinte]

Hi!

I'm a newbie here, but not a newbie to soapmaking... unfortunately, i lost my old book with recipes, the ones I tried and worked. Right now, i'm using a new recipe;

500 grams of olive oil
500 gr. sunflower oil
30 gr. beeswax
300 gr. coconut oil
180 gr. lye
488 gr. pure water

this is the second day i'm trying with this recipe... and it just won't trace! what am i doing wrong???
and why is it that in different soap calculators (that I used to make this recipe) the lye amount mostly stays the same, but the water really does vary? there was one recipe saying it only needed 430 grams of water. but i stuck to what most of them said, mostly because i was afraid of ending up with excess lye in the end.
i'm at a loss! please help! it feels like i need to start all over from the start... while i really do know what it's like to have a perfect trace... i just lost the recipes used then!

suzanne from the netherlands

 

[judymoody]

The least amount of water you can use to get all of your lye dissolved is a 1:1 ratio. You could certainly go 2:1 without too many worries, so for your recipe 360 g water to 180 g lye.

The water amount seems a bit high to me. Your proportion of saturated fats is also on the low side. That might contribute to your slow tracing.

Are you using a stick blender or are you hand stirring?

 

[suzannevrinte]

hi! thanks for such a quick reply!
I have used a blender (but not a stick one, i know there's a difference, but i don't have the latter) the type that is used to make batter for cakes and all, and it just hasn't helped a bit... so that's made me very much more sad on the try yesterday i only used a spoon, but stirred well, but now using this blender intensively, with periods of waiting in between, there seems nó difference at all.

thanks for the information on the amount of water...!! it does sound a little scary to me to go so much lower on it, but if i can gather enough courage to use this recipe again i'll certainly try less water.
do you also suggest a different kind of mixture of oils? i'm not keen on palm oil for environmental reasons, and don't use animal fats either, so i'd rather stick to the kinds i've got - but if in a different proportion would be better/faster to trace, i'd sure like to try...
thanks again!