Teach Soap

Hi, there. I'm completely new to cold process soap making. In fact, I have not yet made my first batch. The thing that is giving me pause is that I am afraid that I will make too much, or not enough, soap. The recipes online I've seen either don't state how much soap they make, or else they make too much soap. Being a complete newbie, I have no idea how to modify a recipe designed to fit into a five pound mold to fit into a two pound one. Or even how much total weight (or weights, depending on the oil, perhaps) of raw soap batter end up as two pounds of finished soap. Can anybody help me? I don't want several pounds of waste.

I always have extra molds ready to go, just in case.

Do you have the volume of your mold? For example, my Brambleberry silicone mold holds 50 ounces. 1 ounce of oil (by weight) is also roughly 1 ounce by volume. This is NOT precise, but it's good enough for determining how much goes in the mold.

My BB mold holds 50 ounces. I use soap calc. The water amount is set to a default of 38% by weight of oils. This is a bit more than 1/3. So, using that rough estimate, my soap will be 1/3 water and 2/3 oils. I figure out what 2/3 of 50 is, and that is how much oil I use for that mold. In my case, my BB mold holds a 2 lb batch.

You can also use Length * Width * Height * 0.4 to give an approximate amount of the oils you will need to fill the mold.

For example, the Bramble Berry 10" silicone mold would be 3.625 * 2.25 * 10 * 0.4 = 32.625, which is just slightly over 2 lbs of oils. But I also have an extra mold handy, just in case.

If you see a recipe that is given in percentages, or can convert it into percentages, you can scale it up or down yourself. If a recipe is say 50% Olive, 30% Palm, 20% Coconut (<---totally just made that up, use whatever recipe you have), then you would multiply the total weight of oils by each percentage to get a scaled recipe.

So to fit my BB mold from above, it would look like this:
50% Olive * 32.625 oz = 16.3125
30% Palm * 32.625 oz = 9.7875
20% Coconut * 32.625 oz = 6.525 oz

Bramble Berry has a calculator that will do that for you too, in case you're not good at math: http://www.brambleberry.com/Pages/Lye-Calculator.aspx

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~Kelly~

Until you get the hang of it, excess soap batter can be poured into a stand by mold. Any and all soap waste can be used in various ways. I have odd lumps of soap made from excess batter - when I have 2 or 3 of these, I grate them with a cheese grater, dampen slightly, and form into soap balls. I end up with at least 3 months worth of soap just in soap balls! And the different colors/scents make for a unique soap. You can also cut the excess soap into chunks and embed them in a new batch later. With a sharp vegetable peeler, you can make curlicues - strips of thin soap layers that curl. There really is no such thing as "extra soap" - it can always be used in some way in a future soap.

Thank you so much for the great advice!