onmyway67
Member
I've got 2 CP batches under my belt, and plan to do a third one this weekend. Once I've poured my soap, I have a big fancy stainless steel bowl full of the left over goop. What is this stuff at this point? Is it soap? If so, why do I seem to need more soap to clean it? LOL. I told you it was a dumb question, but I'm genuinely curious.
On my second batch (Olive, Palm, Coconut, Cocoa Butter and Jojoba - a Cavitch recipe, with a 10% discount if I recall, scented with EOs and swirled with cocoa as colorant), I poured all but one bar worth into an 11 x 11 wooden box. The bar I poured into a plastic soap mold. Both resulted in a bit of a mottled and freckly looking product, but the large box at least I was able to cut into soap after a 24 hour insulation period. I peeked at the lone bar at about 18 hours, and it was much more mottled and freckly. It had an orange splotch on the bottom of the mold. Out of curiousity, I broke it in half. It was much softer than the box soap I cut just a few hours later, and was very coarse looking with large granular formations.
How much of this was due to peeking 6 hours earlier, and how much with heat loss because of the single bar in a small mold? How much with the undeniable fact that, really, I don't know what the hell I'm doing yet? Is it even advisable to cast a single soap batch made at whatever given temperature in molds that vary so much in size?
Also, I stick blended this second batch to what I in my vast wisdom considered to be a 'light trace'. Shortly after that I observed that when I spent a few seconds coloring some of the soap I separated for swirling that my larger bowl of soap seemed to have lost it's trace when I returned to stirring it. Can you lose trace, or did I not completely have it in the first place? As I said before, it did set ultimately set fine in the large wooden mold.
Thanks so much in advance!
On my second batch (Olive, Palm, Coconut, Cocoa Butter and Jojoba - a Cavitch recipe, with a 10% discount if I recall, scented with EOs and swirled with cocoa as colorant), I poured all but one bar worth into an 11 x 11 wooden box. The bar I poured into a plastic soap mold. Both resulted in a bit of a mottled and freckly looking product, but the large box at least I was able to cut into soap after a 24 hour insulation period. I peeked at the lone bar at about 18 hours, and it was much more mottled and freckly. It had an orange splotch on the bottom of the mold. Out of curiousity, I broke it in half. It was much softer than the box soap I cut just a few hours later, and was very coarse looking with large granular formations.
How much of this was due to peeking 6 hours earlier, and how much with heat loss because of the single bar in a small mold? How much with the undeniable fact that, really, I don't know what the hell I'm doing yet? Is it even advisable to cast a single soap batch made at whatever given temperature in molds that vary so much in size?
Also, I stick blended this second batch to what I in my vast wisdom considered to be a 'light trace'. Shortly after that I observed that when I spent a few seconds coloring some of the soap I separated for swirling that my larger bowl of soap seemed to have lost it's trace when I returned to stirring it. Can you lose trace, or did I not completely have it in the first place? As I said before, it did set ultimately set fine in the large wooden mold.
Thanks so much in advance!
