If that happens to you, keep stick blending until everything is smooth. That will make your batch thick and may affect your previous design, but you want it fully emulsified so there are no pockets of lye. That keeps everything melted and gives you plenty of time to work. Find cold process soap making projects here. Bramble Berry Inc.
Search Catalog Search. Shop by Product. Additives and Lye. Essential Oils. Fragrance Oils. Bath Bombs. Body Care. Soap Making. Tools and Accessories. Safety Supplies. Candle Wicks. Holiday and Seasonal. Valentine's Day. Fall and Halloween. Winter Celebrations. Digital Goods. Label Templates. Gift Certificates. Shop By Craft. In fact sometimes it's so slow that you wish it would hurry up but this very slow tracing is necessary.
Some fragrance oils and essential oils contain substances including alcohols that can speed up trace.
This can give you less time to make your beautiful swirls. Fragrance oils will behave differently depending on what they are made of. Some fragrance oils might have the same name but if they are made by different manufacturers they might contain different things and may affect trace in different ways. The fragrances to look out for are Floral fragrances — Lily of the Valley and Rose are usually culprits.
Some suppliers can be really helpful and will offer advice about their fragrance oils and how they affect trace. It is a good idea to test your fragrance or essential oil blend first before you do your fancy swirls. You can add it before you separate your soap into colours. This means that you will have to separate your fragrance as well. So lets get started. Below is an example of how you would go about doing this. Worked Example My uncoloured soap weighs g.
It will be very runny and trace on the surface of the soap will be just barely detectable. It will pour like cream. This is great for swirling or pouring soap into fancy, intricate molds. Moderate trace is a thin pudding consistency. It shows drizzling on the soap surface distinctly, but still pours relatively smoothly.
This consistency is good for most layering and some embedding. Heavy trace shows a very distinct drizzle on the surface of the soap. Im new to cold process soap making and would just like to know if I can use regular tap water or filtered water to mix with my lye. Will it make a difference? What does the distilled version do different and how do I make it or purchase it?
We recommend using distilled water for soapmaking! Tap water and filtered water can have microbes or bits of metal that do odd things in soap. Distilled water is made by boiling water and collecting the steam from that process. The steam is nice and pure, ensuring no weird reactions in soap. You can find distilled water in the grocery store, typically right next to the jugs of purified water. I have been having difficulty getting my soap to anything beyond thin trace.
My first batch I blended for two and half hours when both oils and lye were at degrees. The soap got hard over night. The next couple batches I used the same recipe and one still took hours to come to trace, one made it to hard in three days another in about My last batch was equal coconut and olive oil, but I tripled the recipe to fill more than one mold.
It has been a week and still not all the way firmed up enough to even take out of the mold. Am I just not waiting long enough? I think I can definitely help you out! Are you stirring your soap with a hand blender? If so, I would definitely recommend switching to a stick blender. A stick blender can emulsify the soap in as little as 30 seconds, depending on your recipe! Even with stick blended soap, it can take a couple of weeks for that soap to harden up, especially with a softer recipe.
However, after it cures for weeks, it should firm up. To help speed that process up, you can add more hard oils to your recipe. Hard oils include palm oil, palm kernel flakes and cocoa butter. Those oils help your batch trace faster, and also make firmer bars. Sodium lactate is also really helpful. Adding 1 tsp. Thank you, I have actually been using a stand mixer. I just pulled it from the mold and it had set firmly in places and was near perfect but the rest of it was like clay.
I read where you can melt it down and remold. Does this help? If you do this should you add cocoa butter or harder oils when it is melted? Good learning tool when things go wrong. You can try rebatching that soap if you like! That involves grating the soap up and melting it over a heat source. That can help emulsify the soap nicely, and get rid of extra water that makes it soft. Also, because your recipe has already turned into soap, I would recommend adding more oil.
Instead of hardening it, it can actually make it feel more soft and oily. Instead, I would recommend adding equal parts or double of a nice hard soap. That can help firm the batch up overall. Then, for the next batch, a stick blender is really helpful. It gets things emulsified in no time.
I agree Vanessa, I love the way softer soaps feel! They will take longer to trace and cure, but they feel nice on the skin. My soap reaches trace very quickly. I notice that when I add my lye to the oil it almost immediately solidifies.
I am guessing that my lye solution is too cold? Most coconut oil has a melting point of 76F. If your lye is cooler than that, it may be solidifying the coconut oil, causing it to thicken up quickly.
I would recommend upping the temperature of your lye to at least F. We typically like to soap with both oils and lye around F. That keeps everything nice and melted, and gives you time to work with your design.
Hi, I tried making cow milk soap here i mixed lye with frozen milk n continued d recipe. I would recommend giving your soap a few more days to harden in the mold.
Normally, we recommend giving soap around days, but depending on the recipe, it can take up to a week to be able to unmold. Patience is key when soaping! If the lye water and oils are at a greater than 10 degree different, will it quicken trace? What if your lye water is too hot? Thanks for the great post! I am trying to figure out why my soap reaches such fast trace. Can I use a candy thermometer?
If the lye and oils do have quite a bit of difference in temperature, it can affect trace. For instance, if your lye water is too cool 90F or lower it can start to harden the hard oils and butters in your recipe. This will cause the butters to solidify and thicken quickly. Also, a candy thermometer will definitely work!
Anything that accurately takes temperatures is good to use. Aluminum reacts with the lye and creates toxic fumes. If the lye and oils are hotter F and up , that can speed up trace as well. It will take some experimenting to find your perfect temperatures, but F is a good place to start. Stick blending is another huge factor. Depending on your recipe, it can take just seconds of a combination of stirring and stick blending to emulsify soap.
Once there are no oil streaks, you can stop stick blending. For more intricate designs, it helps to stick blend until the soap is just emulsified so you have lots of time to work with your design. Just an update. I started using the candy thermometer and…. I currently have the most adorable salt soap in molds waiting to be taken out tonight and have a Taiwan swirl which needs another day or two before it is ready to come out of the mold. Thank you so much for your help! I am so excited!
If you take pictures, we would love to see them on our Facebook page. I made a batch of cold processed soap four days ago. In my soap recipe I used natural Arknetta, dried beetroot powder and pink clay.
The soap took a long time to trace using a stick blender — about 10 minutes. The resulting soap is smooth, moist and almost wet. I put the excess soap into two single soap moulds and when I finally removed the soap it fell apart. I am not sure if i should re-batch the soap — I thinks that I have used too much water and not enough lye. Your suggestions are appreciated. Can you tell me a bit more about your recipe, including what oils you used, the temperatures you soaped at and where and how you stored the soap?
If the soap has a lot of soft oils, it will take longer to harden up. In that case, it should start to firm up after weeks of curing.
That may explain why some of the bars are soft while others are harder. Hello, I have just made my first batch of CP soap. I followed the recipe on soapqueen tv — equal parts olive oil, palm oil, coconut oil.
I did get thick trace as I had to spoon the soap into the moulds. I am using individual silicone moulds for each soap. I removed the soaps after 48 hours and they still seem very soft. Bits of soap were left along the edge of the mould. Why is this? It seems to have a strong smell but not of the fragrance, maybe one of the oils?
Does the fragrance come through more as the soap hardens? Thanks, Lucinda. That soap may just need to sit a little bit longer! Soap typically takes days to harden in the mold. It will then continue to harden after weeks of curing. To help your soap release faster, you can use sodium lactate!
The usage rate is 1 teaspoon per pound of oils in your cool lye water. Also, how much fragrance oil did you add to the soap? We usually recommend.
However, that will vary based on the fragrance! Also, we tend to choose all of our fragrances based on how they smell after 6 weeks of curing.
So, that scent may become more noticeable as the soap cures. Thank You!!!! I am brand new to soap making. I tried my first two pond cold batch.
I used a very simple recipe. Just olive, coconut, caster and palm oils. I used lye and water. I hand stirred it to a light trace. I poured it into the mold. I covered the mold with handi wrap.
I covered the mold with a bath towel and let it rest for 48 hours. It formed 2 distinct layers. The top is very oily and the bottom is solid. Is this because my apartment is too hot? Can this batch be saved? I have read a lot of the blog and did not find my problem. I put the entire batch back in the mold and put it in the refrigerator.
The oil layer solidified but liquefied again as soon as I took it out. Like I said this is my third and biggest batch.
My first, one pond batch turned out great. It is OK. So I tried the bigger 2 pound batch and it did not work. I look forward to your suggestions.
While you can hand mix your oils together, it usually takes at least two hours to do so. We definitely recommend using a stick blender. Stick blenders usually only take 30 seconds to 1 minute to get everything fully mixed together.
For the separated batch, I would recommend using the Hot Process Hero method! In that method, you basically cook the soap to help it emulsify. Yesterday I tried the beginners kit for cp soap. Several things went wrong…. It was very warm in the house, I waited for lye water to cool, tried to warm up oil to get them close in temp. First with ss spoon, then stick blender, it did nothing holding it up right. I tilted the blender and it blended the layers together.
But it came to thick trace fast, it looked well blended but was thick. Could not even add fragrance. Had to spoon it into mold, it was even getting lumpy. It will be 24 hrs in about 3 hours, I covered it and let is sit in the hot garage, thinking of gelling it. Looking at it now, the top has oil on it. What did I do wrong? It is in the house now and I will wait until later to check the mold and maybe slice it.
Should I wait or cool the lye water down, not heat up the oil? And stir very little, until it looks blended then stop? I hope to do swirls with different colors and add fragrance.
Thanks for all of your help.
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