MarieJeanette

I use cardboard shoe boxes, one scent per box. I poke a few ventilation holes in the sides for air circulation, and then I also glue a cotton ball to the inside top of the cover, adding about 1/2 mL or so of F/O to the cotton ball (same F/O that the soap is made with), and then I place the cover over the box so that the cotton ball is close to the soaps, but not touching them. Works great! MarieJeanette

I personally love goat's milk, as well as coconut milk. I buy them both in cartons (not canned or powdered ). The goat's milk is made by Myenburg and is in a carton in the refrigerated section of the grocery store; and I find the coconut milk (Aroyo brand) at the Asian market in 8 oz cartons (similar to those little juice cartons) right next to the canned milks. It's 100% coconut milk with no additives at all. Anyway, both lend a real nice, dense, creaminess to the lather of my soaps. It's a very rare thing for me to soap without some form of milk nowadays. I just love the creamy difference they make! MarieJeanette

My sister bought me one of Paul's TOG molds for Christmas here: https://www.diannassundries.com/Items.asp?itemtype=Molds%20Cutters&orderby=item_number&direct=ACS&pagetitle=Molds%20and%20Cutters I really love it. It looks like they still have them in stock, too. MarieJeanette

Oooh! Thank you so much for that link! It looks like raw goat milk may be coming to my area this month! I've always wanted to try raw goat milk. MarieJeanette

I pretty much use goat milk in all my soaps as 1/3 to 1/2 of my total soaping liquid, with the remainder of my liquid amount being aloe vera juice. I've never used the aloe gel because I personally don't like adding my lye to something so thick. The aloe juice I buy has the same consistancy as water, and the lye mixes in real well with it. For the goat milk, I add the refrigerated kind found in a carton in the refrigerated section of the supermarket made by Meyenberg (instead of the canned or powdered found down the baking aisle). I pour my cold (not frozen) goat milk directly too my room temerature oils and stickblend it in real well before slowly adding the room temperature lye/aloe mixture. This method works real well for me. My soap has enough goat milk in it for me to feel the wonderfully creamy difference that goat milk adds, but without all the hassle that comes along with adding my lye directly to the frozen milk. It's just much easier for me this way. Also, I get no ammonia smell and no discoloration by doing it this way. Depending on the color of oils I am using, my goat milk soap always turns out either a light creamy yellow color or an almost white color. Even if it gels. No more tannish-brown goat milk soap for me. Yay! HTH! MarieJeanette

I can find coconut oil at the Walmart Superstore about 4 miles away from were I live, but not at the plain ole regular Walmart a half a mile up the street, so I drive the few extra miles to get it at the superstore. They have lard, too. I buy the pure (not extra virgin) olive oil in big containers at Costco for a really good price in comparison to other near-at-hand places. I love it in my Castile's. I also find big bottles (32 oz) of castor oil at the mom & pop health food store down the street, as well as aloe vera juice in the half gallon sized containers. And I just recently found out that tallow is sold at the Smart and Final about five miles away from me in 50# cubes. I didn't find this out until I had aready bought and recieved a 50# cube from Columbus Foods, which cost me big bucks to have shipped here. I'm getting it at Smart and Final next time for sure! Oh, and if you happen to have an Asian market nearby, you can find some good soaping stuff in there, too. I get my coconut milk and coconut cream at the one in my neighborhood. MarieJeanette

I've been doing a lot of reading lately on making liquid soap and my head is still spinning from all the different info. I haven't made any yet as I'm still in the research stages, but from all I've read so far, you do not need to add borax to your liquid soap as long as you calculate a superfat into your recipe. Snowdrift Farms has some liquid soap recipes on their site and they don't have any borax in them. The reason for adding borax seems to be for the purposes of neutrilzing your liquid soap if it was made as per Failor's recipes in her liquid soaping book. Failor is really gung ho for having a crystal clear soap, and so her directions call for making a lye heavy soap on purpose and then neutilizing it with borax in order to get a crystal clear liquid soap. There's more than one way to skin a cat (or make liquidsoap), though. Here are two more tutorials for your reading pleasure: http://latheringsforum.com/bb/viewtopic.php?t=6286&highlight=liquid+soap http://www.essencesupply.com/liquid/page3.html At this time I am really leaning towards the method used in the first link -Oaktree's CPLS method from Latherings. The second link will give you more info on using Polysorbate 20. HTH! :smiley2: MarieJeanette

I ran across this thread over on the SoapDish last night as I was searching for something else entirely: http://www.soapdishforum.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=18645&hl=lush+soaps Scroll down to Post #7. It explains that Lush's soaps are made from M&P bases. HTH! MarieJeanette

I was just on the Lush website and was able to get a gander at their soap ingredients, and it's pretty much M&P with goodies thrown in. Their soap has the same basic ingredients that are listed on the ingredient lists of my own M&P bases I have here at home. Pepperi, It's very easy to make M&P to look like CP with all the different opaque M&P bases out there to work with nowadays. I've got a couple of them myself from WSP and they work great, except I can't swirl in them like I can in CP. The dead give-away is the ingredient list. When you see things like Propylene Glycol or Sodium Laurel Sulphate in the ingredients, you can pretty much tell that it's M&P. HTH! :smiley2: MarieJeanette

I make mostly olive oil soaps quite often, and what you described sounds alot to me like my mostly olive oil soap when I used to use a full water amount to make it. I now use a 33% to 40% lye solution when making a mostly olive oil soap and they are hard and solid all the way through from the get-go. The full water one would have a firm enough shell around it, while still being soft and gooey inside, and it would take a couple of months for it to harden up. Do you think it could've been your water amount? MarieJeanette

I have the Dead Sea Black Mud from FNWL and have used it in 2 batches of CP soap so far to give my soap a granite-type of look. My soaps turned out great. Depending on how you mix it into your batch, you can get different looks. I gently stirred mine in with a spatula at trace to get the granite-look. I don't know much about the other types that FNWL sells, but I'm intriged by the Moor Mud and would like to know more about it, too. MarieJeanette

Yes, thank you very much! I've been very curious about the CPLS method. It seems to be more up my alley than HPLS. MarieJeanette

A really good lilac for CP is True Lilac from Scent Works. It soaps like a dream and it smells awesome! MarieJeanette

Wow! I'm so sorry you had such a bad experience with SW. I order from them all the time and will continue to order from them seeing as how I have had nothing but excellent service with them (and I love their F/O's). They are actually one of my favorite suppliers. MarieJeanette

I would just add it to your oil list and compute a superfat. From all I've read, it's pretty much a moot point to add a special oil at trace in the hopes that it'll be the special one that your lye ignores, especially since saponification is still going on in your soap for up to about 3 days after you make your soap. Another way of saying it is that saponification is not fully complete the minute one is done mixing their special oil in- it's got a few days of work to go yet- and being that the lye is an equal opportunity saponifier, it is going to go after whatever oil it wants to saponify in spite of what you want it to. In the end, no one really can't say for sure what oils are actually roaming free in your soap, and so it's just easier, and makes more sense in the scheme of things, to just go ahead and list your special oil in with the other oils and then calculate for a superfat. I hope that helps. MarieJeanette

I used to do M & P exclusively before I fell in love with the challenge of making CP. There's nothing wrong with doing MP and you can get pretty creative with it and make some beautiful soaps with it, but for me, it got to the point that I felt I could only go so far with it before I adversly started affecting the ingredients already in the base. For instance, if I added too much of this or that, it would greaty reduce the bubbly lather, and so on. Also- I found it to be very difficult if not darn near impossible to swirl in it. I was really beginning to feel too limited by MP to make it exclusively anymore. The mad scientist in me felt like I needed more of a challenge. I still do MP, but only for certain soaps, like aquarium soap, for instance (my nephew loves those). With CP, I feel like the possibilities are endless, and I like how I have so much more control over the ingredients, and also how I want each different batch of soap to feel like and behave as compared to MP. If you're new to soaping, I'd start out with MP to get the feel of things, and then go aheadwith CP. There's no reasn why you can't have fun doing both. MarieJeanette

I use Milky Way molds all the time with each batch of CP I make. I calculate my batches to be big enough to fill my log mold, with enough left over to pour into a few Milky Way molds. I've even done some CP batches using nothing but Milky Way molds. They all come out great. The size of my batches is 2.2 lbs. With that size batch, I can make roughly 12 Milky Way-molded soaps of good size. My unmolding method is very easy and it works everytime for me. I kinda discovered this method by accident, but like I said, it works every time for me. What I do is let the soap sit in the molds at room temp. for about 24 hours or so, and then I stick the molds in the freezer for at least 4 hours- or even better, overnight. Then I take them out and let them sit on my counter upside down. I don't do anything to them, but just let them sit upside down on the counter and in the meantime go about my business. Usually, within about an hour or less, they just pop right out all on their own, without me having to press on them or anything. They just slide right out while I'm out and about doing other stuff. I'll lift up the mold and lo and behold- the soaps stay behind on the counter! I don't put any mold release stuff in my molds either. I like doing my Milky Way molds this way because they pop out perfect every time, without any soap sticking to the mold. When I used to use the press and force method, it was always hit or miss. Sometimes my soaps would slide out nicely, and sometimes they would not. When they didn't, I'd get mad because it would ruin the pretty design on the surface of my soap from the mold. If you've never made CP before, though, I'm going to side with Eugenia and say that you may want to do it in a log mold first. They are more forgiving if your batch happens to go south. In order to show off to perfection the good, clean designs from your Milky Way molded soap, you're going to want to pour at light to medium trace, and in order to do that, it's a really good idea for you to have the feel of how your recipe will behave first. Once you've seen that you have a consistantly good, behaving recipe and fragrance oil, then go for it! You don't want your recipe to do what mine did today, that's for sure! I used a fast tracing F/O that made my batch stiffin up real quick, and so the Milky Way molded portion of my soap looks like crap. The portion of it that went into my log mold looks really good though, because I poured that part first before it got too stiff to work with. HTH! :smiley2: MarieJeanette

Mine do, too, and I don't even need a pouf to encourage things along. It gets beautiful, big bubblage all on its own. I believe it really all depends upon the oils one chooses to make them with. I use 100% coconut oil, so that's probably why mine bubble up so nicely and effortlessly. MarieJeanette

Yes, you can make soap with dairy milk. There are many people that do. Here are some directions from a site that uses predominately dairy in their soaps: http://www.mullerslanefarm.com/soapmaking.html One of the things I have next on my list of soaps to make is a dairy soap using heavy cream. I've done goatsmilk and also coconut milk soaps before with very good results and so I'll be giving this a try soon. Here's another link. Just scroll down the page until you find the post written by MullersLaneFarm: http://www.soapdishforum.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17544&hl=jersey+cows HTH! MarieJeanette

Good for you! For F/O's, I like these suppliers: The Scent Works Sweet Cakes Magestic Mountain Sage Wholesale Supplies Plus Bitter Creek North Bear Labs Daystar For oils and butters: Oils By Nature Olive Tree Soaps Columbus Foods WalMart (for coconut oil without me having to wait or pay shipping) MarieJeanette

Salty Mariner from A Garden Eastward! It smells so fresh and salty good that it almost seems to have been especially designed to be used in salt bars. MarieJeanette

Yay! I have one of your TOG molds and I love it, and now after seeing this post I can hardly wait for the cutter you're workng on! MarieJeanette

I just recently started using this and I love it. You can buy the sheets of foam at the craft store. They are the same sheets used for making animal cut-outs. I bought some that are 12"x18". You just measure & cut 5 pieces to fit the dimensions of the insides of your mold, and voila! If you cut the pieces just right, they overlap slightly and fit snuggly against each other to prevent any leakage. When the soap is done, you just peel the sides right off and wash to use again. HTH! MarieJeanette

Pros and Cons of M & P..........I love playing with M & P. There are so many creative things you can do with it and the scents don't morph. The cons for me would be that it's darn near impossible to do decent swirls with it, it doesn't last as long, and I don't have much control over the base ingredients, except for deciding what base to choose. (I use WSP bases and some SFIC) Pros and Cons of HP.............I have yet to try HP, so my eperiences with that are nil. Pros and Cons of CP................I once used to think that I would always be doing MP because I was totally petrified of lye, but I'm now so in love with making CP. I've gotten over the 'lye factor' and it's really not as bad as what my overactive mind had been conjuring up. I've found that it's about as risky as driving a car is risky, or cooking over campfire is risky, or making French-fries is risky. If the proper precautions are adhered to, there's nothing to get freaked out over at all. I really don't know why I waited so long to try CP. The pros for me of CP are that I have total control over the ingredients, as well as limitless recipe combinations to try. I can buy mostly all my ingredients, except scents, at either Walmart, the health-food store, or the supermarket. I can design my own recipe on SoapCalc to get the individual kind of soap I like. I can do swirls. The CP soap lasts longer and feels nicer to my skin. It's smells wonderful and looks great. The cons would have to be the lye factor, but that is truly very easily overcome.... You would have to be on the lookout for acceleration with certain F/Os, but once you figure out which F/Os accelerate, you can modify your recipe or plan of action for next time around...... There are other potential problems such as ricing, overheating, separation, etc, to be on the lookout for, but then again, there are also successful remedies for those problems. If all else fails, rebatch! All in all, to me at any rate, the cons end up being so much non-cons when all is said and done, as long as you are prepared beforehand. Have fun whatever you decide to try! MarieJeanete

With clear MP for 'water' and a little bit of oatmeal MP base for 'sand', it's fun to do aquarium soaps. You can get little plastic fishies to put inside so it looks like a little aqaurium. MarieJeanette