Thank you for normalizing this way of masterbatching.I used up the last of my MB fats on a batch of soap this morning so I thought I’d just bust out a fresh batch, and I totally goofed up! Not paying close enough attention and feeling over confident in my process, I guess.
I had my olive oil in my big ol container and grabbed the next liquid oil and went at it. At the last gram, it dawned on me that the bottle felt different and sure enough, I was adding castor instead of sweet almond! Ugh! Enough castor to make it 13% instead of 5% for this batch size. So I do math the hard way, probably over stressing, to figure out how much more olive I need to balance it out. Well, of course, I don’t have that much olive in my jug, so in the middle of all this I had to stop to run to Costco. DH goes with, and we get everything on my Costco list including the OO - aka not just a quick dash to get back at it.
I am finally done, and now I have a jug of clearly and boldly labeled Olive/Castor blend for my next MBs.
My soapy thing today was making a yuge batch of liquid soap paste. I'm following @Zing's example and am working on Operation Use Stuff Up, and today, that was red palm oil. I wasn't crazy about it in bar soap, but I actually like palm oil in lotions and liquid soap. It makes a thicker LS and of course, red palm adds a nice, natural color. Below is a pic of 2500g of LS paste, enough maybe to last a year. I dilute it 5:1 for our foamer bottles.
Oh, I almost forgot to mention that this was an *exciting* batch to make! Got my heart rate up enough that I might be able to skip my aerobic workout tomorrow morning.
Seriously, though.... I was pouring the KOH into the water, and a whole bunch of it plopped into the water a lot faster than I planned. It went to the bottom of the water container, and before I could stir it, kabloom! (which is why we never put water on top of lye, lol). All I could do was step way back and let 'er rip. Post-volcano measurements showed that I only lost about 20g of solution, but it was all over my stainless work table and making its way towards other things nearby. I quickly threw a towel over the puddle, which stopped it from going anywhere.
Because I wasn't sure how much of the 20g was KOH and how much was water, I poured the remaining liquid down the laundry sink (yay for a clean drain). Then I came back to clean up the mess. Let's just say, I know why they add lye to cleaning solutions, because my stainless table is sparkling clean now!
Anyway, I consider myself very lucky that it wasn't worse, and very thankful for PPE. When I made the new batch of KOH solution, I noticed that the flakes were extra feisty. KOH always crackles, hisses, and pops, but this solution was positively rolling at a boil, even with slow pouring and mixing.
Thankfully, the rest of the soaping was quite uneventful. With warm oils, hot lye, and glycerin for ⅔ of my liquid, we got to sticky taffy within 2 minutes. She's resting now under a towel; I'll dilute tomorrow as I've had enough for today.
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