The most common
problems
Air Bubbles:
There are no "air bubbles" in soap usually, but a stick
blender can actually cause little tiny empty holes in the soap.
If you have bubbles in your soap, and there is liquid in them then
they are really lye pockets and this is not safe to use. You might
be able to save it by crafting it.
Gone Cold:
If your soap goes cold during the first 24 hours
or turns to mush, you probably lost the saponification process. There
can be a lot of reasons for this.
- Your weights of oils,
or lye may have been off causing a bad batch and Mother
Nature shut down your operation.
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- Or your temperature
was not high enough with the fats and it just lost temperature.
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- Or it just caught
a chill. :)
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After thinking long and hard about what you did during
weighing, and if you're sure your weighing was correct, then pour
it into your soap pot, put it on the stove. Heat it while stirring
constantly. When it reaches 130, remove from heat, pour back into
a fresh mold This is what I call 'kick starting' it.
Other Hints and Tips:
Fine and dandy, but where the heck do I get
palm oil or coconut oil?
Coconut oil you may find locally in a restaurant supply shop in your city.
Palm oil can be a lot more difficult to find.
Or see Soap Crafters oils page.
Lye!? Eewww.
Sure, lye is not just for opening drains. ;) Soap is a result of a chemical
reaction between lye, fat and water. In 24hrs, you no longer have lye, fat
and water. You have soap! If you followed the recipe exactly, you won't
have any lye at all in your soap.
Is that ENOUGH Fragrance for an 8 pound batch of soap?
Yes it is! That is, if you are using the fragrance which Soap Crafters
supplies. Many companies buy the lowest quality fragrances to offer what
seems to be really low prices. You need to use about four times the amount
of these oils and you will have problems with the scent fading away very quickly.
Recipes are nice, but HOW do I make it?
See the "how to make soap" page .
I want to use fragrances instead of essential
oils.
Some fragrances work great and others do not. When adding scenting material
at trace to your soap base you have to be very careful. The best scenting
material for this way of making soap base is a fragrance that has been
made for soap making AND tested for that purpose. If you
want to use fragrance, please purchase Soap Crafters Fragrances ,
which have been tested for adding at trace in cold process soap and also tested
in Crafting Soap. Soap Crafters will not add a fragrance to the cold
process line that causes seizing, staining or separation of your soap batch.
I want to add herbs and flower petals to my soap!
Don't add it to your soap base at this time. Wait until you craft it. Adding
herbs, powders, colorants, and fragrance oils can ruin your soap's saponification
process. Some experts have managed to get around this rule with certain substances,
but it really isn't worth the chance of ruining a whole batch of soap.
More Help When you need it most!
Please use this link
to join our email chat list , members are always happy to
help you! This chat list is open to those who haven't even made their first
batch of soap and those who are professional soap makers.
Or just log in and chat live online right now! Live
RealTime Chat, click here. On the live chat you can
talk back and forth with someone from our company. |