Teach Soap

Run your recipe through a lye calculator. Ammonia has no SAP value, so you won't find it there. I would leave it out. It really is not needed.

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Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

My mother and grandmother made soap also. I have been making soap since 1969.
Now with your recipe. Lye added to water will heat up unless it is old or has been compromised with moisture. Your 1 qt. needs to be weighed. Always go by weight and not volume. Is your concentrated fragrance oil soap safe? Some are only safe for candles or potpourri. The most I ever use of a fragrance is 1 oz. per lb. of soap. At a higher %, fragrance oils can cause irritation.

If you soap was like thick batter, that's a heavy trace. If you take a stick blender out of your raw soap and it leaves light trailings on top of the soap before they sink back in, it's safe to pour. I pour at a thin trace, kind of like thin gravy. By the time my soap reaches the paste you're talking about, it's already in the mold as I like smooth soap and smooth tops. I've touched my soap with a bare finger also. It doesn't burn the same way as if you injured yourself with a burn from the stove. If you don't wash the raw soap, it will eventually damage the skin and can cause a burn, just not as fast as a grease burn or a heat burn.

If you use a mold insteading of a roasting pan to cure your soap in, you will get more even slices. It might keep ticks and chiggers away, but you cannot make this claim with your customers. If you make any type of a claim. it's considered a cosmetic according to the FDA. If you get caught, the fines are steep.

If you want to make laundry soap, you can add borax to it after it cures and it's shredded. I would not add it before then.

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Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

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<3 SoapyJoes

Trikes, I am not trying to be mean here, but the info is out there for beginners, and we did try to direct you toward it when you first posted, you just didnt want to go there. As for a step up from beginning recipes, where you can add to them/change them....well this is available as well. By going to the calculator you can sub in/out various oils and see how/if the properties change and how it all affects the hardness of a bar. We did also give you this information. The goal as far as I am concerned is to make your own recipe, as I do not believe in using someone else's recipes at all, but their are plenty of recipes out there so that beginners (especially) can use a tried and true recipe to learn with. In fact, we all pointed you in that direction so that you could see what "normal" was before you began experimenting. You chose to experiment anyway, which is fine, and certainly is your choice, but you cannot blame anyone or anything for wasting your time except for yourself and your choice to not listen to the answers you received.
If I may speak for SoapBuddy (and I am sure that she will correct me if I do not accurately represent what she feels) , we do not ask you to be politically correct, we simply strive to point out issues that we think may be problematic. We never know who is selling and who is making for themselves, and who begins making for themselves but will end up selling. So we try to point out things that you might not yet know about or have even considered.

I hope that you will stick with the forum, and I really hope that you will take the time to review the teach soap recipe section and view the Soap Queen's videos on utube. She takes you through day one of making soap through to those advanced techniques that you mentioned. There are also plenty of other videos and web sites that do the same thing, but of course we are partial to BB! Aside from the on-line stuff, there are also plenty of good books. If you want recommendations I am sure that there are plenty of people here that will tell you their favorites. In fact, one of the very first Soap Queen videos gives you Ann Marie's favorite book. There is a wealth of information on this forum as well. The search feature at the top is very nice for specific questions, and of course there are plenty of people here willing to assist as well.

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Remember, it's not just that we weather the storm, but how we dance in the rain.

Tammy

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Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

Trikes, you did not ruffle my feathers, rather your comments sounded as though we ruffled yours, especially when you commented that you wasted your time. With all of its great points, the computer does not allow you to hear tones and inferences, so it is easy to misinterpret. I do recall that you have dial up, but the links for the recipes are available without fast speed, so I hope that you explore some. Also, if you can watch the videos at the library or anywhere else, I highly recommend them, since you can see what she is speaking about instead of just reading what things will or should look like. As for the recipes, if you cant get the link down for the lye calculator you can learn to figure it out by hand, but the calculator is much easier, and gives you more information. As for the books, the library will usually order in those that you request, so you could try that. If not, then maybe you can find a used one on Amazon. I know what it is like to be on a fixed income, a lot of us do, so believe me, I/we understand that! We are all here to help each other, so I hope that you do continue to come back, and I am sure that it wont even take you a year to learn soaping!

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Remember, it's not just that we weather the storm, but how we dance in the rain.

Tammy

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Linda
I know the voices in my head aren't real, but they sure have some great ideas!

trikes,
You need to add the lye water to your oils, not the other way around. For a small recipe like yours, you will get more accurate measurements if you convert the oil(s) amount and the lye amount into grams.

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Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

Well, this is an update,,,,,,,
Decide to turn my[ POTASIUM SOAP ] INTO BALLS . Tried one ball on my greasy,stain up pants,,,,,,,it did not take the grease stain completly out, but it did clean the pants, the balls did have that brown spots on them .(DOS )and I could smell the lard.

Now when I changed the recipe,and made it without the amonia,but put in the fragrance, it came out pretty good and smelled a lot better!!!!,Plus no DOS, just white soap,and it felt really slippery, now I will enter both ,the laundry balls and the hand soap in the county fair 7/18/11 ( IND. CO. Fair )
Thanks to ya'll ,I will try a new recipe soon,waiting on the PALM OIL.