Today is PRODUCTION day again. We are running low on a few soaps so of course we had to get more in the molds. We make some of our soaps 3#s at a time and really need to up the number of pounds to at least 9#s. This way we will not make some of our soaps as frequently. Now we will say that we do have quite a few soap fragrances that we make 9#s at a time and those are the ones we sell the most of. Anyway, here are a few pictures along with the process.
- Decide what ingredients you want to use and then use soapcalc.com to calculate the lye and water amount as well as the possible finished quality of the bar. Soapcalc.com has a wealth of information about oil qualities.
- Gather everything you will need, stick blenders, mixing spoons, colorants, fragrance, etc.
- Weigh liquid (water, milk, aloe, etc.) add lye to it and mix thoroughly. For this batch we used ½ coconut milk and ½ water, we mix the lye with the water and added the coconut milk at trace
- Weigh oils, butters and fragrance
- We do the RTCP method, which means we don’t wait for the lye to cool to a certain temperature. Once we have weighed our oils and butters, we then add the lye water. The lye water melts the solid oils/butters (palm, coconut, shea, mango, etc.) Please note when we add cocoa butter to a batch, we melt it in our chocolate melter and then add to the oils/butters.
- Mix until trace, which is a thick pudding type consistency
Add colorant and fragrance. We did a two color swirl so we had our bowls ready with the colorants and just added traced soap to each color and swirled in the bowl. We are a bit swirl challenged. - Pour in mold
- Unmold after 24 hours
- Cut and Cure for a minimum of 4 weeks
