Thank you for your information loved the tutorial, you explained the process very well and clarified some points for me. Can't wait to try making my soap.
Hi Jennifer, thank you so much. I am really scared and intimidated about using lye. I am very happy to hear that you had the same experience. Thanks again, so much.
Jenn, I love this tutorial so much! I have made soap two times but for the most part I just watched my friend make it! Thanks for breaking it down and I will most definately return to this video!
Thank you so much 💓 your video took some anxiety that I get when I watch videos that I watched to learned how to make soap. 😅 so calming and kind. God bless you 🙏 ❤️
I am so glad! I too was fearful for years! So thankful I got over it, soap making is now one of my favorite hobbies! I've got a liquid dish soap tutorial coming up!
Thank you very much!!!! I am a beginner who has been unsuccessful until I came across your tutorial. Yay, my soap will be ready to gift for the holidays! You are a wonderful teacher . May God Bless you and your family always. TY
What a wonderful demonstration. Thank you for explaining the process so well. I would like to try this recipe but just wondering if you might have fine-tuned the water quality as the Pine Meadows lye calculator mentions 14oz. I’m still new to soap-making so thought I should follow the calculator to the letter till more batches are under my belt. Thank you 😊
I'm excited to try making this recipe. I actually have all the oils to make it I just need to get the equipment. I have a question, can I use the spoons, spatulas, bowls, measurers again in the kitchen for food after cleaning them? Thx!
Thanks for uploading this! I have that exact mold and all of these ingredients so this is a perfect 1st soap recipe for me! One question though: if I replace CACAO BUTTER for the Shea Butter will it still work?? ...THANKS again! :-)
Any changes you make need to be checked in a lye calculator. Just put in the recipe in there and change out the cacao butter for the shea butter and see how much lye you would need. You may want to read on the properties of cacao butter vs shea butter as well just to make sure they are similar
Thank you for this video! You explained it very clearly! Now to start!! ❤️ Oh also how do I wash all the things used? Can I stick it all in the dishwasher with my other dishes? Or do they need to be kept separate?
Good question, some people say you shouldn't use the same immersion blender for food and for soapmaking...I do however! You should definitely wash it really well! As far as the rubber spatula and things like that I do keep them separate. It's a good idea to wash wearing rubber gloves and lots of water.
Thank you so much, I've made soaps with the melt and pour methods for a while and wanted to move over to lye soap making. I've read so many articles that caused me to worry so much about this method. I've watched some clips but they used lard (I don't want lard) or palm oil (I won't use palm oil for anything due to the environment). Your clip is perfect, down to earth, easy ingredients and simply shown that this can be simple! I liked being able to watch the whole process and so now will buy the lye and a new scales and a blender for just soap making. Can I ask please? Did you use pure essential oils or fragrance oils? I decided I would like to use fragrance oils. Also should I wear a mouth and nose covering mask as well as eye coverfor the lye mixing? I thought I would have to mix the lye in my kitchen under the extraction fan with animals shut out of the room; or am I being too careful? Thank you so much, I'm neurodivergent and your clip is perfect for us to follow, we like and need simple and most neurotypical people make explanations too convoluted for us. You're ace 🌷❤️💪❤️🌷
She used fragrance oils from Nurture Soap…also I would always wear a mask, gloves, long sleeve shirt and pants, goggles too and mix the lye outside or on the counter with a window open.
A soap calculator is definitely the easiest way. I have to refer to a book when I am trying to calculate a recipe manually. It is a math equation: You must look up the SAP value of each oil that you are using. That then needs to be multiplied by the amount of oil in ounces and then that number will tell you how many ounce of lye you will need. This is actually rather complicated and I would not do it by hand unless you have a very good understanding of saponification and superfatting. I hope that helps a bit, it's a great and interesting study!
Question. Can you achieve proper results eliminating the olive oil? I was wondering if maybe it had to do with proportions or if you could manage to make it just with the coconut oil and shea butter
No, you cannot just eliminate an oil. You would have to create a new recipe. You can use a lye calculator and use just shea butter and coconut oil but you would have to decide on the percentage of each.
Costs whise how much did you spend for the ingredients? Im hoping to start a holiday gift baskets to sell and soap is one of the items i want to craft to add to the baskets.
Of course everything is purchased in bulk so your initial investment could be high but you could make many batches. I purchase my lye from Nurture Soap and I source the butters and oils from Amazon or Sam's club. So you might spend $50-60 for the initial ingredients.
This was my very first CP soap! It was so easy and so carefully explained. Thank you Jennifer! I have one question…what would make the fragrance go away? I used BB Apple Sage FO, I added 2 oz. and I cannot smell it at all. What would cause that to happen?
The smell may come back as it cures. Depending on the quality of the oil it may fade. I have recently learned about adding a bit of kaolin clay to anchor the fragrance and I will say it really works! 1 Tsp of clay per pound of soap and mix it with a bit of water so that it doesn't clump.
@@joaniecaldwell6417 Yes, you can do it either way, I like to mix part of the fragrance with the clay and then the rest I just mix in with the batter. I hope that helps! You may read up on it and see how others do it as I have only done it with a couple of batches. Your fragrance really may come back as it cures too, I don't understand the science on that exactly but have read that it happens!
Good question, some people have mixed ideas on this. I think if the utensils have been thoroughly cleaned they should be fine, some people wait to clean them until the soap has cured on the utensils. Others keep a separate set of utensils for soap making. It's really up to you and what you are comfortable with.
Sorry for the delay, this is a cold process soap meaning there is no other heat source other than the heat from the melted butters and oils and the heat from the natural chemical reaction of the lye.
I believe you can switch it out, and yes make sure it's frozen. Just to be sure, you should always run any changes through a lye calculator I can't remember off the top of my head if the milk will change the amount of lye needed.
Hi good morning I hope Get this message will be able to respond. I use my measuring Pyrex cup because my scale giving me the precise amount. I melted and followed your recipe but I added 4oz more of olive oil and 8oz of shea butter. As I began to cut it with my knife half way down it split In half, would you be able to tell me what I did wrong can it be remelted and do it again. It is soapy. Thank you so much
Hi there, usually you cannot just sub in or out ingredients with soap. Different oils have different SAP values and qualities. Olive oil is a liquid oil and shea butter is a solid oil. Did it split in half because it was too soft or is it crumbly? You could go to an online lye calculator and put in the amounts you used to see if the correct amount of lye was used for the amounts of the oil. Any time you change the amounts of an oil you should always run it through a lye calculator to make sure you are adding the right amount of lye. Too much lye can also make the soap crumbly. I hope that helps!
Soap recipes are chemistry. You need to understand what each oil does and then decide how much (percentage of each) you would like in your soap. If you change a recipe at all meaning change the oils, the lye amount will change. You must use a lye calculator to make sure you are making a safe product.
Of course airflow is important. The soap may be safe to use sooner, however, if it is used before fully cured it will not last as long! A hot process soap can be used sooner. I plan to have some hot-process recipes in the future. In the meantime you might research that!
Hi! I missed something. Did you say you put the soap in the freezer? If so, for how long? Did you do that so you didn’t have to wait the 2-3 days? Thank you!
You can put it in the fridge or freezer for the first 24 hours before you take it out of the mold, I usually do that only with soaps that contain milk because they can burn while going through gel phase. I think that is what I mentioned in the video. With this soap, you can just cover it and let it sit on your counter for 24 hours before you unmold it. It should be hard enough then to cut. I hope that's clear. Sorry for any confusion. Gel phase is your choice, if you are using any coloring, gel phase will make the colors more vivid. If you aren't using any colorant, I don't see the benefit of gel phase and I have had my soap overheat and crack when wrapping it in towels.
@@theeverydayfarmhouse8722 Just a quick suggestion, it's possible your soap is cracking during gel phase because you could be soaping too high 100-110 degrees, or your soap could be lye heavy. When I first started I was soaping at 105 and for my area it's way too high now I soap at about 90 degrees because it's always very humid here! Thanks for the awesome video!
@@Common_Sense_With_Auntie Thank you, maybe so, it just seemed to take so long to come to trace at a lower temp. I appreciate the tip, I will try it for my next batch! So much to learn!
@@theeverydayfarmhouse8722 mom I love the way you explains and above all how you respond to our comments I love you and wish I could send you Shea butter I'm from ghana
It's hard for me to know what went wrong. I just made the soap yesterday and it came out perfectly. It's of course not going to lather like a "soap" from the store as those have sulfates. My only guess on the oiliness would be that you maybe didn't get a real trace before you poured it in the mold? Perhaps the oils were not saponified? Again, it's hard for me to know without being there.
Trace is when all of the ingredients are fully incorporated and the batter is thickening. When you reach trace, you can lift the blender and the batter will leave a trail on top of the batter. It's thick like cake batter. I cut mine into bars and place them on end on a cookie sheet or a lined basket. You just need them to be spread out enough to have air circulate around them. I keep mine in the bedroom on a dresser out of the way. Some people have special racks or places just for curing soap. It's whatever works for you.
if I'm too intimidated to use the sodium hydroxide and purchase a Natural Shea Butter Moisturizing Glycerin Melt And Pour Soap Base for Soap how much do you think i should use to substitute your measurements ?
Which are the E. oils & F. oils that will stay for a while? All the fragrance oils I used in my CP soaps fades away during the curing period itself. Could you please suggest some solution to this? Thank you.
Add some kaolin clay to your recipe. I have found that this really works to anchor the fragrance. Mix the clay with a bit of water, usually equal parts to keep the clay from clumping or streaking in the soap. About 1 TBS per pound of oils in your batter. Add the clay mixture when you add the fragrance. This should help
Yes,kaolin clay works retaining the fragrance, either fo or eo.I used essential oils with french green clay (rosemary/mint) and months later still smell amazing.I use 2 teaspoons per 500 grams of oils, in my case lard and castor oil.I also used french rose clay and got a sweet light pink soap, where I added natural lilac fo.
If I spilt lye on a plastic cutting board….do I have to throw away the cutting board? I poured vinegar on it 🤷🏼♀️ had some oil on my glove and the container my lye water was in slipped a little
Fragrance is really a matter of preference. However Brambleberry has a fragrance calculator it recommends 0.7 oz per pound of soap. The best thing to do would be to use their calculator and choose what fragrance you are adding and then let it calculate it for you.
I am sorry I don't know what you mean. The coconut oil should be heated with the other oils to approximately 110 degrees F. I used extra virgin olive oil. Not sure if that answered your questions or not. There is a full blog post here if that would help. theeverydayfarmhouse.com/beginner-soap-recipe-shea-butter-cold-process/
Mine came out thicker than expected. I didn’t get a dripping liquid trace. Maybe I just mixed too long but it happened pretty quickly. Does anyone know why that is? Super fun recipe, I love the oils, I just don’t know if or where I went wrong ❤
@@theeverydayfarmhouse8722I was able to get it in the mold. It didn’t pour I was scooping it out and towards the end scraping it off the tool I was scooping it with
Great question, here is an article I recommend you read on adding honey, it can be tricky: www.soapqueen.com/bath-and-body-tutorials/tips-and-tricks/adding-honey-to-cold-process-soap-tips-tricks-recipe/ Oats can be added to the batter before trace, you want to blend them up pretty well or buy colloidal oats.
