Hot Process Soap Making For Beginners- Make Soap In A Crockpot!!

1. Hot Process Soap Making Intro: Hi, I'm Katie for bladder and Light Co, and I'm so excited to share my new hot process soap making course with you. This course has four sections. The first one is the Welcome Center. We'll talk about some background information like the science behind soap making. A quick overview of the whole process. We'll also talk about life safety because it's essential. We'll also talk about color and send sense because this is where you get to be creative and add some personality to your own soap. The second section is called preparation. We'll talk about the ingredients and tools that you'll need for your soap making and how to prepare your space and your family. The third section is the procedures, the actual steps of making soap. And if you're following along with me with every video in this section, by the end of it, you'll have your very own handmade natural soap. The fourth section is called looking ahead because its ideas beyond your first sperm soap. And it also includes troubleshooting it just in case you have some difficulties. We'll also talk about more things that you can add to your soaps, ideas for packaging your soap, and even ideas for making your own soap recipe. I'll also share some of my favorite resources with you. I'm the maker behind lather and Light Co. I started ladder and Light Co back in 2019 and I only use plant-based all natural ingredients in all of my products. I make candles, soaps, bath blends, serums, creams, a tons and tons of things. But my main passions are candles and soaps, which is why I named the business lather and Light Co. Back when I was first getting started, I read tons of blog posts and books. And I was looking everywhere for all the best tips and tricks. And with lots of trial and error, I put things together and came up with my own methods and recipes that I feel pretty confident about it this point. I feel good also about sharing these procedures with you for your making processes. So I'm really excited to work with you, and that's about it. I'm so excited to share this with you and for you to make your first bar of hot process soap. Here we go. 2. Course Terminology: Let's talk about some terminology that we'll use during this course. First is the word cure. In cold process soap making curing is the time that allows the soap to finish the process of saponification. That's another one of our words. Hang tight. I'll explain that too. But in hot process of the light is neutralized by the heat. Curing is actually not necessary. But curing also allows water to evaporate from the soap, which makes the soap harder and makes it last longer. Lie is a solution of sodium hydroxide mixed with water. Making a lot of the time we use the word lie also to refer to the crystals of raw sodium hydroxide before it's mixed with water. Saponification is the chemical reaction between lye, water and oils that allows the water to transform the oils into what we call soap. Fun fact, soap is actually assault. Trace is the point in the saponification process where the lie and the oils won't separate. They've already emulsified. We can test trace by dragging something across the surface of the soap and seeing if it leaves a trace. Or by drizzling some liquid soap book from the batch over the top and seeing if it's still visible after a few seconds or if it dissipates back into the liquid right away. Vaseline stage is when the soap is heated enough that it becomes a little bit translucent and looks like, well, Vaseline. It's glossy and wax like to the touch. 3. Hot Process VS Cold Process Soap Making: Process and cold process soaps. What's the difference? Sometimes they use the same ingredients in the same proportions with almost the same recipe, but totally different procedures. First, I'll tell you about the long, slow process of process of making. Then I'll let you in on why I prefer hot process soap making in cold process. So it making the oils are heated in a double boiler on the stove and the lie in the water and makes separately. Then when they're within five degrees of each other, usually about between 105120 degrees, then you can mix them together. It's kind of a process sometimes trying to get them to match perfectly. Sometimes involves an ice bath. It's a whole big thing. But once they're at that perfect, perfect temperature, then you can mix them together and bring them to trace, which we talked about is when they've emulsified and they're not gonna separate anymore, he kinda looks like pudding. And then you can use your sense and colorants and make beautiful swirls with cold process of making. And then once it's in the mold, it has to be insulated, which usually involves making a cardboard tent or used to put mine in a cooler with some towels. It's also a whole big process. But if the soap is too hot, it might crack or my bubble and if it's too cool, it might not go through the gel phase, which is a special thing for hot process soap, where the soap becomes kind of translucent and gelatinous and it helps bring out the color to its optimum vibrancy and helps make the same color throughout the soap. Then after about 48 hours, you can check and see if the self would like to come out of the mold. My experience, a lot of the time it's not ready, so you have to leave it for another 48 hours. Then when it's ready to come out of the mold after another 48 hours, then you can cut it and then it needs to cure for four to six weeks. During that time, you have to flip it every four to six days to help make sure that it cures evenly and the water evaporates out of it evenly and the lie is transformed during saponification evenly. So it's a little bit of a hassle. It's flipping it every four to six days and waiting for four to six weeks. There are also a lot of things that can go wrong with cold process. So baking like racing to ash, cracking, bubbling, dreaded orange spots, uneven coloring from a mist gel phase. Also where I live here in Hawaii, my cold process soaps used to sweat a lot. They'd have like some condensation on the outside, which is okay for personal use if it's already next to the sink or in the shower, but it's hard if you want to share it with someone else to give them a wet soap with cold process. So making there a lot of things that can go wrong and it takes a couple of months from the day that you start to the time that you can use the soap, it don't get me wrong. I had a long phase where I really enjoyed cold process of making. I loved the beautiful swirls that you can get with the light trace. I loved being really careful and slow and mindful in all the steps. And I really enjoyed it. But when I started going to the farmer's market and having more orders, I needed something that was a little bit faster. People don't really love it if you say, Great, Thanks for your order, it'll be ready in two months. I've gotta go home and get started making your soap. Now let's talk about hot process. You heat up your oils, butters in the crock-pot. You mix your life separately while you're waiting for them to melt. Then when the oils and butters have melted and the Lai has gone transparent, you mix them together, stir it with a stick blender, let it heat up until the Vaseline stage. Then when it gets there, you turn off the crock-pot and let it cool down a little bit. Then you can add the sense and the colors and mold it. Then I put mine in the freezer, but you could also leave it out. It doesn't have to be insulated. And guess what? The next day you can unfold it, you can cut it, and you can use it. One day. It'd be fair a couple of extra days to harden does help with hot process of making, but it's safe to use the very next day, unlike with cold process. So making where you have to wait four to six weeks with cold process. So making, I feel like there's a lot more potential for unlucky mistakes and tragic disasters. The process is a bit more finicky and demanding. Hot process. Soap making is how pioneers used to make soap over the fire. It's an oldie and a goodie. And in my opinion, it's more fun and I'm excited to do this with you. You'll be using handmade soap that you made yourself before, you know it. 4. Lye Safety: First things first, safety, the boring but very necessary apart, please do not skip this video. In soap making, we use a chemical called lye or sodium hydroxide is also used to clean dreams, make face cream, and even in making pencils before they're baked, lies caustic and can do serious damage to other materials in living tissue like your skin. It can cause blindness and it can be fatal if it's swallowed. It can stay in your clothes and he threw them with time. It can take the finish off of wood and do damage to lots of other materials. In a nutshell lies pretty serious stuff, but the dangerous can be reduced with some precautions. You're going to want to wear goggles, gloves, and a mask, plus long sleeves, pants, even close to choose, Just in case of any drips or drops. You'll also want to wear your safety gear when you're cleaning up just in case there's any lingering lie on your tools. If you do happen to spill lie on yourself, you won't feel it right away. It'll take a minute or two before your skin starts to itch as the light starts to burn your skin. If this happens, take off any contaminated clothes, even your shoes, and wash your skin under cold running water for 15 minutes. Vinegar creates a chemical reaction with lie that releases heat and neutralizes librarians. It's not recommended to use vinegar to wash lie off of your skin because of the heat part. But it's a great tool for cleaning up your workspace. Use a rag to wipe down your space and make sure that no light gets left behind. Never use anything that contains aluminum to make soaps. Aluminum and lie or sodium hydroxide together release hydrogen, which is a poisonous and explosive gas. 5. The Science Of Saponification: In a nutshell, saponification is the reaction that occurs when lie, water and oils are combined. It makes up more scientific terms. Every oil, butter, or fat, contains long chain fatty acids. Each one contains three fatty acids attached to a glycerol, which together are called triglycerides. Those different fatty acids are the reason that most soap recipes call for more than one kind of oil. There are exceptions like Castillo soap, which is made with just olive oil. But the different fatty acids react with live differently and bring different benefits to your skin. Like some of them are conditioning or cleansing or which dressing? When the triglycerides from the oil or mixed with lie, the fatty acid chains release the glycerol molecules. They bond with the lie and make soap. Then later when you're using the soap, the soap releases glycerol, which nourishes your skin. 6. Your Own Scent Blends: Creating your own sense blends, whether you're making soaps, candles, essential oil rollers, or any other kind of creation. Making your own scent blends can be a fun and rewarding experience. First, I wanted to make a quick note about fragrant soils. They have a stronger sense and they come in an amazing variety of sense, but they're man-made and some people have allergies and other reactions to fragrance soils. Also quick note, this indentation contains some affiliate links. Essential oils are natural and can be organic, and they're always plant-based. They have unique nutritive properties depending on what plant they come from. They're fun to blend and make your own sense. Essential oils come from the plants leaf, seed, flower, route, or bark. Essential oils are volatile aromatic compounds and they're captured with cold press process or distillation. One way to decide which oils to use is to think about the way that the oil affects our emotions. Oils have ways that they typically effect most people. For example, these oils tend to be uplifting. Cyprus, Douglas fir, peppermint, grapefruit, lemon, lime, white fur, and wild orange. On the other hand, these oils are typically calming. Clery sage, eucalyptus bringing sense geranium, Jasmine, juniper berry, lavender, camomile, Lang, Lang. This is one way to think about which sense to blend together as mint essential oils blend well with wood, IRB, and citrus. So let's say you were starting with peppermint, which is pictured here. And he thought blending it with his citrus oil would be nice. So you might pick grapefruits. And that would be a great blend. Or if you were looking at these floral section, you might choose maybe lavender floral essential oils blend well with wood, spicy citrus oils. So say you wanted to would maybe choose sandalwood. Sandalwood lavender would be a beautiful sentiment. Also it says herbaceous oils blend well with wood and mint oils. Spicy and central oils blend well with wood and floral and citrus oils. Would essential oils blend with mint, floral IRB, spicy and citrus oils. And citrus essential oils blend well with wood spicy floral end mint oils. This image is sort of a different way to think about the same kind of thing. So different themes of sense blend well together. Each of these categories blends well with the ones next to it. For example, herbal oils would blend well with citrus oils or woodsy oils or both. If you wanted to make a slightly more advanced Senate or fluoro oils would go with citrus or exotic, since this is a great way to pick which sense you want to put together. Another way to think about which essential oils to blend together. And also the proportions is through classifying oils as top, middle or bass notes. Top middle and bass notes can be used in a predictable ratio to make pleasing sense. Approximately 15% to top note essential oils, 20% middle note essential oils, and sixty-five percent bass notes. Or another kind of template for making an essential oil blend can be with this ratio with approximately 30% top notes, 20% middle or heart notes, and 50% bass notes. Top notes are typically citrus fruits like lemon or bergamot, or aromatics like lavender and limit grass. Lavender is tricky because a lot of the time it can fit into two categories. It can be considered a top note or a middle node. And there are a number of oils that kind of sway back and forth between being top or middle or middle and bass notes. Heart or middle notes include categories late floral, green, fruity, and ******. And bass notes are woody sense and Balsamiq sense. Top notes. These sense create the first impression, but they don't last long. They're light, crisp and penetrating. Some examples of top note oils are lemon, lime, orange, tangerine, grapefruit, basal bergamot, lemongrass, peppermint, middle or hard notes, or since that should be the body of the blend, they soften and round out the fragrance to harmonize the mixture. Usually since then, after the top note. Examples of middle or heart note. Our camera meal, cinnamon clove, Clarice, age for Rosemary, geranium, eucalyptus, juniper berry, T tree, Cyprus, and lavender. Bass notes are usually not recognized right away. It may even take several minutes before you sense them. They tend to become more pleasant over time and they can give depth to the blend. Some examples of bass notes are truly sandalwood, frankincense, cedar wood, ginger, vanilla. Better over here like Christianity, rose, Jasmine, and lengthening. This slide helps us to decide which sense we wanted to put together and which ones would make a nice blend. Then the idea of top, middle, and bass notes helps us decide how much of each oil to add. Wanted to share a couple of my best-selling blends. Balance is a grounding mix of petroleum and grapefruit for stability and connection and acceptance truly is a bass note and grapefruit is at top notes, so we're missing that middle heart note in this blend. But I still wanted to keep with a larger percentage of the overall ratio with the bass note and a lot slighter percentage with the top note. Grapefruit. Healing is as soothing mix of Lang, Lang geranium and eucalyptus for wellness and comfort. Connected is an earthy mix of lavender, cedar wood, sandalwood, and frankincense. Lavender is a middle notes, sometimes also considered a top note. And then seed or sandalwood and frankincense are all considered bass notes. Together they add up to more than the lavender. This blend is for spirituality and awareness. Presence is a clear mix of Spearman, Clery, sage, and lavender. For purpose, confidence and clarity. Mindful is a cozy mix of lemon, ginger and whenever for grounding, connection and present. I also wanted to briefly share a couple of my favorite resources on essential oils. I love the herbal Academy. They have a number of amazing courses and books were learning about the properties of plants and different ways to use herbs and essential oils. With tons of skincare recipes, bombs, body butters, bath, blends soap recipes. A really amazing complete course book. And also this other book, Modern essentials, gives so much detail about the properties of each oil and other oils that it blends with. It lets you know if it's at top, middle or bass note it says what kind of scientific properties the plant has, what kind of body ailments It's good for what emotional ailments, It's good for lots of other details. And it also includes recipes for making different things like lemon bars. And it also has a reverse index where you can look up what's might be bothering you and then see what essential oils might help. And also these are some of my favorite sources for central oils. Do Tara is a classic? It has a lot of variety and amazing high-quality oils. Mountain Rose herbs also has a really great variety, but they also have an amazing podcast and seeds T's books. It's a really great resource for all kinds of things related to urbanism. And also Rita aromatherapy has an awesome selection of so, so, so many essential oils, they're all organic. I hope you've enjoyed this presentation and I'm including this slideshow so you can refer to the graphics and have fun and enjoy experimenting and creating your own beautiful send blends. 7. Choosing Beautiful Colorants: Making a lot of choices for your colorants. Some of them are natural lake, these powders, and some of them are man-made. Mica is an example of one that's usually man-made. It's actually a mineral powder. But most of the time when it's sold for soap making, it's not harvested from nature, but it comes in insane variety of colors. And it tends to be shiny and make yourself a little bit shimmery, which can be fun. There are a lot of natural colorants to like these Brazilian clays, French green clay, and cocoa. These ones are water-soluble and they will be dissolved in a little bit of water before you add them to your soap, rather than sprinkling straight powder into your soap. You usually start with one teaspoon of your colorant of choice to one tablespoon of water in one pound of soap. If you wanted your whole soap to be green and you were making three pound loaf of soap, you would use three tablespoons of water with three teaspoons of clay in your three pounds of soap. If you want your soap to stay kind of more fluid and workable, then you might want to use hot water to dissolve these in that way, the cold water doesn't kind of shock year soap and start at hardening and cooling. Some of the other powders are not water-soluble, so they need to be mixed in a lightweight oil instead, these are things like turmeric, cinnamon, indigo powder, black clay spirulina powder, spinach powder, activated charcoal, alkyne at root powder, matter, root powder, pumpkin powder. There are a lot of options. Lightweight oils are oils like safflower oil, sunflower oil, apricot kernel oil, Chia seed oil, flaxseed oil, fractionated coconut oil. Any of these non water-soluble colorants would need to be mixed in that. Also the man-made powders like mica needs to be mixed in lightweight oils. And you would start with the same ratio, one teaspoon of colorant to one tablespoon of lightweight oil per pound of soap. If you don't put enough colorant, it won't really show very much in your soap. On the other hand, if you put in too much, it will leak out when you're using the soap and change the color of the water. Also, I wanted to say I recommend choosing different colors with a little bit of contrast if you're using more than one, or also a color that's contrasting with the color of your plain pure soap. If you're just doing one color, the contrast will help your design stand out and make your soap really beautiful. A quick aside about cinnamon, It can be a little bit abrasive on the skin, so go easy with them also, I have a couple of slides to show you with the different hopes that I use different color in sin. Take a look. As promised, I'm going to show you a few soaps that I made so that you can see some of the different color options available and how they turn out in. This first slide shows activated charcoal. And it can be anywhere from this kind of light bluish gray color to a deep like almost black. The next one is turmeric. Turmeric can be in this particular soap, you can see kind of a dark brown and a light brown. And if you put even a little bit less, you can get almost like a light pink actually from turmeric. This soap has coffee and cocoa as the colorants. Near the end of the course, there'll be a section on additional options for colorants. And then we'll talk about using coffee instead of water for your lie. And that's what I did for this soap. So the base light brown is from the coffee. And then this darker brown is cocoa that I swirled in. And you can see there are also some coffee grounds which also I mentioned in the additional add-ins. One of my favorites is Brazilian and clays. They have a slightly exfoliating property and they come in a beautiful variety of colors, so it's water-soluble, so they're easy to mix, easy to use, and they turn out beautifully. This is another example with Brazilian clay. This one on the right is actually French green clay with the pink is Brazilian clay and blue indigo. This, this soap is also using Brazilian clay for the gold and the purple. But then that kind of darker green is actually spirulina powder. This one I used matcha green tea like little ground t, which when I first took it out of the mold, it looked green but then I kind of got a bit earth year with time. This soap is using mater route and spinach powder, that little bit of green at the bottom. These two soaps are using cinnamon and Koko. The one on the left is turmeric and cinnamon. And the one on the right is Coco. Just pure soap. Not a seed is interesting. It's also used to color cheese, and it's something that you have to infuse in the oil rather than use as a powdered pigments. So you have to boil it or not boil, but the oil with the Unidos seeds and that slowly makes the oil turn yellow and you use that. I think I did it in olive oil for this particular soap. And then you use that colored olive oil in your soap in place of the regular olive oil. And the last one, Indigo powder. That blue is just always so beautiful. I hope this helps give you some ideas for colors you could do with your own soaps. 8. Preparing Your Ingredients And Tools: Let's talk about ingredients and tools. First of all, all of these things really should be separate from the ones that you use in your kitchen to make food unsimplified like and creep into little crevices and frequencies leach into plastic and glass. Also, it's part of the good manufacturing practices sit by the FDA, so keep it separate. Let's talk about safety. You're going to want some goggles to protect your eyes. Glasses aren't really enough because splashing lie could come up under just the lenses on the front aren't really enough. You're also going to need a mask to protect yourself from life fumes. Some superiors liked to wear an air filtration mask. You'll also want gloves because your hands are the closest when you're working with the lie and unsimplified soap. Heat resistant gloves are recommended, but regular dishwashing gloves or disposable gloves will work too. You're gonna want to cover your arms and legs. So I recommend old clothes because lie can slowly eat away at your clothes. But you're gonna want sleeves and long pants and probably been close to choose. Let's talk about some of the tools you'll need. First of all, a crock-pot. And you'll also need a kitchen scale for measuring your oils, some containers to measure them in and mix your colorants into the soap, a spatula for all that mixing. This is my container for measuring water and putting the lie into glass or plastic will work. This little container I used for measuring the lion to again, glass or plastic will work. These ones also glass or plastic would work. This is a stick blender. It's definitely helpful for mixing your soap. I recommend one with a stainless steel shaft. You could also whisk it the old-fashioned way, but it's gonna take a long time. Some measuring spoons for measuring your fragrances and colorants. I like to have a sieve to pour the live through that helps get out any crystals that didn't dissolve. Some tools for swirling and making fun designs. This is an official soaps swirling tool, but you can also use the back of a spoon, a skewer, a chopstick. There are lots of options. I'm old. Let me show you some of my other bulbs. I've got a few. First, I'll talk a little bit about this one. This is kind of my go-to. It's a loaf mold. And after you finish, then you cut it into bars and they turn out length nice little squares. I like that. They're definitely bars of soap. But there are tons of other shapes like these little circles. I've had cats, a little rounded squares, chopped remote, shells, hearts. This is another loaf mode, but it's just a slightly different shape. It'll turn into rectangular soaps instead of square. This one's fun, it's an embedded. So you can make a long loaf of hearts and then stick it inside of this love and you'll have hearts inside. Last one. This one's a slab mold. The mold, you kind of make this soap standing this way. And in this lab mode, you may click a long narrow slab and then you cut it. This would maybe make nine rectangular soaps. But there's so many options. I've even used. Milk carton or other found objects are recyclables. There's so many ways that you can make your own mold or so many options for mulch that you can buy the milk carton. After it's empty and you washed it out, you just pour this open and let it harden and then cut the car, turn off the outside, slice it. That's all I've got about moles right now. And you'll also need some small cups or containers for mixing your colorants. I like these espresso cups. Depending on the mode that you choose, you might also need something to cut yourself. I have this box with debits for marked for cutting. You could also just use a knife or a wire cutter. Ingredients what actually goes into this soap? So I've got some castor oil, olive oil, sweet almond oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter. You could also use shea butter in this recipe. I've tried it. Some other ingredients you'll need for your soap are live and I have a huge container of it, but you could definitely get smaller ones. Distilled water and some colorants for this soap, I'm using some different colors of clay. Some fragrance I like to use essential oils for cleaning up. You'll need distilled white vinegar to wipe your surfaces like your counters and a dedicated sponge that's just for sloping. I cut the corner off so I can remember this is my sloping sponge. And a regular commercial detergent like Dawn. A commercial detergent will help cut the grease and oils on your soap dishes so you don't send all of that down the drain. I also wanted to share with you a little bit about the properties of the oils that are used in this recipe. Castor oil comes from an extract from the castor bean plant. And castor oil draws moisture to the skin, creates a beautiful lather and soap with large luxurious bubbles. But the oil itself can be a little bit sticky. Thick. Cocoa butter comes from the cocoa bean. Cocoa butter adds a luxurious and moisturizing feeling to soak. It has a nutty and chocolate he aroma and it adds hardness to the final borrowers. Coconut oil comes from the meat of coconuts. It's pressed from the meat. It's super cleansing and soap. So much so that it can actually be a little bit drying because it cuts on oil and grease. And it also creates large bubbles. Olive oil is pressed from olives, and it's a thick oil that moisturizers the skin and adds a creamy lather to soap. It's mild and it produces a small bubble lather. Sweet almond oil comes from edible almonds. Actually, it's a lightweight oil that's moisturizing and conditioning and soap. And it also contains many vitamins like B6, and it can make soap soft. So some of these properties of these oils are conflicting, but the overall percentages that come together in the soap make a really nice rounded bar that has all of the best properties of soap. 9. Preparing Your Space: Another thing that's really important is getting your space ready. Make sure your family or whoever is at your house knows what's going on in the area and they're touching some of these things could be potentially dangerous. Also keep your pets out of your sloping area. Also make sure that food dishes are very separate so that you can avoid cross-contamination. Also, you might want to cover your workspace with newspaper or cardboard. I use poster paper here just to avoid splashing the surfaces of your counter or your table wherever you're working. 10. Procedure: Measuring And Heating The Oils: You'll need a kitchen scale because soap making is kind of scientific and specific. This recipe uses ounces. So when you turn on your scale, make sure it's on the right unit of measurement. Then put the container, you'll be measuring the oils in on the scale. You'll need to tear the scale. You might have one button that will start it back from 0, or you might have to share the scale on and off again, but you want to be sure that you're not measuring the weight of the container as part of the measurement of your soaps. Start by measuring the solid oils and butters in this recipe, that will be the cocoa butter. The coconut oil. The cocoa butter comes in a big solid slab, or sometimes in little pieces. The little pieces melt faster, which sometimes makes it a little bit easier, but you can totally trust it in, in a big chunk. As long as you've measured in it's the right size chunk. Obviously, this is gonna be a little bit big for my soap. I'm going to use a knife and trim it down. So it'll probably end up kind of shredding into my container. If we need four ounces of cocoa butter, here's a start. Now it's at 3.99 and you want that's close it off. I'll take it. I'm going to open up the crock-pot and put the cocoa butter in. We can use a spatula to help get it out of the container or your hands? Either is okay. Then I'm gonna go ahead and turn this on because we have some things we're ready to melt now. I'm going to put this shredded cocoa butter and these chunks of cocoa butter back with these other ones. I'll put that in a Ziploc bag later and put it aside for the moment. Next, we'll measure the coconut oil. Tear your scale makes sure it's on 0. And then you can start scooping some coconut oil into the measuring container. The coconut oil does not need to be melted before you measure it. We're going for ten ounces of coconut oil, 9.98. I'll take it. Then we're going to add the coconut oil over into the crockpot that's already turned on low. I'm going to use the spatula to make sure I can get out as much of the coconut oil as possible. Both because we want at all because we don't want this coconut oil that's leftover to count as one of our other oils when we measure them next, which also we can prevent by tearing the scale. Want to get it all? Pop back on here before moving on to the next oil, tear the scale. Next I'm going to measure the castor oil. We need just one ounce. Here we go. 1.05. It's a little bit extra, but I'll take it. Pop that in the crockpot. Castro has a little bit sticky, so it takes a little bit of extra scraping. Next, I'm going to measure the sweet almond oil. I put my container back on the kitchen scale, tear the scale. Then I'm ready to measure eight ounces of almond oil. Ooh, 7.76.08 core that we're onto our last oil, the olive oil, we mean ten ounces. It still says 0.11 here. So I'm going to tear the scale and then measure the olive oil. 9.510.08. That'll work. Perfect. Close it up. Double-check kids on low and we're good to go. Now we have to wait for the oils to melt before our next step with the crockpot. But while it's melting, we're gonna make our lives solution outside. 11. Procedure: Mixing The Lye Solution: Suit up. You don't want any skin showing on parts of you that could be splattered when you pour the lie into the water. You also need to protect your eyes and your respiratory system. Make sure you're in a well ventilated place for this part of the process, you don't want to breathe in any live fumes. I like to do this part outside. If you're inside, tried to step over the sink so it's really easy to clean up any spills. You're gonna need your life, water, something to stir with. A small container for the live, your kitchen scale. A bigger container to hold your water and then pour the lie in here as well. Tear the scale first and then measure 12.54 ounces. Perfect. Then put the water aside and put on the smaller container that you'll use for the life. We're going to measure 4.73 ounces. Tear the scale. One thing to note, you always want to pour the lie into the water. Nevertheless, water into the live because it can bubble up and over the top and splash. When you're ready, pour the life straight into the water. Then stir like and get a little bit clumpy, especially on the bottom or sometimes little crystals float on the top. So it's important to sturm thoroughly. Then when I'm finished, I like to use the lie container to catch the spatula so I can carry it to the sink without any spills. Then put the line in a safe place. Make sure that people in your home know that this is a caustic chemical and they shouldn't touch this container. It's okay to take the solution inside after a couple of minutes. It's not giving off the poisonous gas fumes anymore. I'm going to go wash these right away with my commercial detergent. But you could also put them aside for a moment and wait until you've finished using all the tools that you'll use with the lie. So your stick blender and your lie container and your sieve and wash them all together at once with your gloves on. You're live solution is ready to use when your mixture goes from cloudy to clear. 12. Procedure: Combining The Lye And Oils: When the whales and butter's melted, set up your stick lender beside the crockpot. Like to have my sieve on hand to turn the crockpot off just to be safe. Then take the lid off the crockpot. At this point, I'm not wearing a mask because the lie is not giving off fumes. And I want you to be able to hear me and see my lips move. But if you're concerned about the splashes coming onto your face so you can totally still wear your mask. I take the line and the sieve. And I for the life through the sieve, just to catch any ly crystals that might not have dissolved sitting in the water. Then something I like to do is then to use this container and hold the SIB over it to take it to the sink. I'll be right back with my container, half full of water. I'll tell you why in a sec. I'm back with the water. So when I'm finished using the stick blender, I'll put the end in and turn it onto sort of pre wash it bearing. Now I'm going to use the blender in the crop up. For this cylinder. I like to start with it on low. I'll put it down into the crockpot on a slight angle and tap it a couple of times in case it pulled in a water, I mean, air down with it. And then start on this angle. You want to check out the angle if it's too straight, you won't get as much movement in the crockpot. But if it's on too tight of an angle than it'll be spinning a little bit on the edge. There's a pretty big sweet spot, but you're going to want to find it one for a bit. If you're feeling good about the angle that you have, then you can turn up your stick. Wonder, you don't have to. You can keep going on with the low speed. You'll still get there. With time. You'll see the mixture start to thicken. You might get a lot of bubbles in your mixture if you do try to adjust the angle a little bit, or you can also stop the blender, turn it upright and stir a little bit to get rid of some of those bubbles. Were looking for a medium to thick trace, which is like a heavy pudding texture. Trace means when he put the top of the stick blender onto the top of the soap, you can see a mark where it was or a trace and you want it or some people go across and some people just tap it right where it is. And either way you'll see some kind of trace that it was there. Whenever you put your stoop wonder back in, tap it a couple of times on the bottom, Teresa, release any air bubbles and find your angle. Starting again. It takes a couple of minutes. Let's check her trace. I'm stirring a little bit and letting it shake off a little bit and then I'm going to tap it on top. There's a little bit of a market, but it disappeared pretty fast. So I'm going to do a little bit more blending and tapping on the bottom, making sure I found my angle again and then blending away, giving it a little stir, checking again for trace, pull it out, tap it on top. That looks pretty good. Then I'm going to use this cup of water. I'm going to make a quick shift over here and bring this stick blender into the water. Turn it down to level one. You want to make sure that your water is kind of a low-level because when you turn it on, you don't want it to explode out of there. And then I'm gonna give it a little pre washed by doing little pulses. Also, don't forget to close up your crock-pot and turn it back on. I'm going to detach this top half and take this part over to the sink. Okay. So for cleaning up, you're still going to want to wear your gloves because even though we've been using this lie is still caustic. If you might have spilled it all, you'll want to wipe your surfaces with the distilled vinegar. And then for your dishes and tools, soak them a little bit first with hot water and your commercial detergent, then scrub them. And also your sink. 13. Procedure: Let It Cook - What To Look For: Especially when the soap is first cooking, and especially when you're new to scoping, don't leave your soap unintended. Sometimes it's a little immature and it acts up if it's not getting enough attention. Basically, it makes a volcano it likes to creep up, expand, expand, expand, expand, expand, and then explode over the sides of your crop up, all over your work surface. Then you have to clean it up really carefully with all of your safety gear on and you lose some of your soap. So there's a way you can stop it though, if you're watching it and you can see your soap is expanding, expanding, expanding, and it's getting kind of close to the lid. You'll quick pop the lid off and stir like crazy. And that'll help the soap go back down. And then when it's stable again, you can close it back up. You'll see me do that in just a minute because myself does that almost every time. She's gonna it's not really that bad. But he can feel that a volcano is coming. The soap is kind of pulsing a bit and it's spitting little bits. It's frothy, it's bubbling. It's really light, pale yellow. It's coming closer and closer to the top. So I'm going to open it up and give it a stir. And as you can see, it was a bit steamy. What I'm stirring it, It's getting kind of it doesn't mean it's going down a little bit, but you can tell that it's still got a lot of volume heat. And it's just getting a little bit more cooperative. It's coming down in the bowl, sticking to the sides a little bit, but that's okay. I can scrape them. That's probably good. So I'm going to leave this soap behind, scrape the sides a little so that part doesn't turn to that matt white clothes, a backup, go wash my spatula. I made a mistake here. The goggles stayed on top of my head instead of over my eyes. They should've been on my eyes. Don't do this at home. Also, after you stir it down, your spatula will be covered with unsimplified soap. You're going to want to watch that with your dedicated sponge kind of right away in case it happens again or for later so that when it's time to put your colorants and fragrances in your spot. Your spatula is clean and ready to go. Right now I'm not wearing my safety equipment, but when I have to pull the lid off and I will put those on, some soap, even tries to volcano more than once. So you're going to want to keep checking on it, but you'll get a feel for whether or not it's going to explode over the sides. Whenever it does or you feel like it does, you can just start back down. But in general, if it's not threatening to come out of the crock-pot, you don't really want to stir it. You want to let the moisture and the heat stay in there so that it can cook as evenly as possible. Some sober is even put plastic wrap around the top of the crockpot to make a seal to keep it really locked in tight. So as our soap is cooking ware weaning and looking for the Vaseline stage, it'll look kind of translucent. And usually it starts at the edges and then on my crockpot next state comes in the middle and then slowly kind of meats. And then when the whole thing has that Vaseline look, then you know, it's ready to turn off. Some sulfurs also use a sort of old fashioned method called Zap testing, where you take the spatula and you get a little bit of soap on the tip of it, make sure it's cool and then touch it to your tongue. That if you feel like you're just got an electric shock and it kinda goes through your body. There's still active why? In their soap and it's not ready. But if you just taste a soapy taste, that's soap and its finished with its Vaseline stage. I say this to you more as an anecdote than a suggestion, but the method does work. Sometimes when you're waiting on the Vaseline stage throughout your soap, you'll get some matt white soap on the edge where it's especially hot. And that part has actually overcooked and it's going to stay white and just kind of extra solid in your soap to. But in spite of that, you'd rather err on the side of overcooking, then under cooking and having rod lie. If you start to get those matt white spots, it's okay. Just when you're scooping the soap out of your crock-pot into your mold. Skip those parts or be really mindful about where you're putting them because they're definitely going to show. If you're still feeling nervous about whether or not there might be lie in your soap. Even if you think it got to the Vaseline stage, you can always set it aside to cure. In cold process soap making. They never heat the soap and they just set it aside to cure. Curing is a process of waiting for the saponification to finish, which means turning the lie into soap. Hot process, it doesn't need to cure. You can use it that day. But if you feel nervous, you can also let it cure even though you heated it and looked for the Vaseline stage. It's just an optional precaution. If you feel nervous. 14. Procedure: Let It Cool And When It's Ready: Great news. We've got Vaseline phase all over this soap. So I'm going to go ahead and turn off the crock-pot. This is actually one of the hard parts waiting because I think putting the colors and the sense in is one of the most fun parts of all. But you definitely want to wait because you can make a little bit of a mess. Severe sense if you put them into early, what you're looking for is like right now when I'm looking in the crockpot, the soap is fluffy and it's still pulsing a little bit. And you want to wait for her to calm down and cool down. So the soap will drop down in the crock-pot. And it will look like it has a thin film on top. It'll look really smooth. That's how you know it's ready. Also when you take the lid off it, you don't want it to be billowing out steam like this where it keeps, keeps, keeps giving off steam. It's okay when you first open it if there's still steam, but you don't want it to be so hot. You almost want to be able to put your hands like you were gonna touch this soap and feel like you could get pretty close. Not that you should. It's still really hot. So you're going to want to wear your gloves, especially under the film, you can definitely burn yourself still on the soap. I'm also wanted to say about essential oils. They have a really high flash point, especially compared to fragrant oils. So if you put them in early, it can ruin them. And also if you put them in really early, a lot of your oils disappear in the steam and you don't get to use them in the soap really. If you put it in, then immediately your whole house just like reeks of whatever sent you were using. It was probably too early. If you didn't put it all in already, then maybe hold off and what else on putting in the other sense that you're gonna put in. Give it a little bit more time, maybe 15 minutes, see. If you feel like it's enough better, check on it. And then start again with your oils. The flip side, if you let it get to cool, then it becomes harder to stir colorants and fragrances into. And it's just it's kind of a stiffer. You'll find that there's that happy medium between too hot and too cool. And it's not the end of the world either way, but you definitely want to let it cool down a lot. 15. Procedure: Preparing The Colorants: Preparing your colorants, you'll actually add this sense first to the soap, but you want your covenants to be ready to go because as soon as you open the lid and start working with the soap, It's going to start hardening and cooling down. You want these to be ready to go and just toss in and mix on the fly. So usually we use a carrier of some kind to kind of blend it up because you don't want to put straight powder into the soap because it's harder to make it disperse. In this case. I'm using water with my Brazilian clays. I have well, I have a yellow Brazilian clay, a purple Brazilian clay, and French green clay for this particular soap. I'm measuring out one tablespoon for each of the colors of hot water. Hot because that will match the temperature of the soap better. And then it will stay flow air for our design. Then I'll measure out one teaspoon of each of these colors. Usually you use one teaspoon of color into one tablespoon of the carrier to one pound of soap. For some colorants though, you'll need to use a lightweight oil instead of water, like for indigo powder or turmeric. If you didn't see the lecture on colorants, check it out in the welcome section. It gives a little bit more background information. I like to do measure my colorants in order of which one is the lightest to the darkest so that I don't get too much dark color in my light colors. Once I have these measured, I'm going to give them just a little bit of a swirl with the back of this spoon. Mix them up a little bit. Then I'm going to just set them aside nearby so that they're ready to go. When my soap has the sentence, pro tip. If you want really fluid designs, then turn your oven on to the lowest possible temperature that it can be on. And when it reaches that temperature, turn it back off, then put your mold, your Measuring, mixing containers, and any other tools that you'll be using that will touch the soap, like you're swirling tools into the oven to let them warm up a little bit. That way, when you're using the tools for the soap, the soap won't get shocked so much and it won't cool down as quickly so you can work with it more in making your beautiful designs. 16. Procedure: Adding Scents: Okay, here we go to me, this is probably the most fun part. I'm gonna go ahead and put my gloves back on because the soap might be pretty hot. It shouldn't have any more lye in it, but just to protect my hands since there'll be right up close to the hot soap. Then we'll add the sense. So I'll open up the crockpot. I'm just going to pour the essential oils straight into the crockpot. I used to PRE measure them and put them in another little tiny cup and then just pour them all in at once. But now I just toss them in. I'm going to do this is my one tablespoon measure. Gonna do about 3 third tablespoons, which is ten, about ten teaspoons. Here's 12. I'm smelling the oil because it's the hot soap, but it's not like overtaking and really intense. I know that the slope is probably not too hot. That was two tablespoons of lavender. And then I'm also going to do another y and third, third path approximate tablespoons of lemon. Then I'm going to stir it all together. 17. Procedure: Adding Colorants: For the soap that we're making today, it has three, well, four different colors. If you include the color of the plain soap and three colors that I'm mixing. So I have three containers there. And I'll measure some soap. Well, not measured, but just kind of go up some soap into each one. Especially with hot process soap is it gets kind of starts to be solid and marketed yellowy or like putting me it's getting thicker. I want to go quickly and it's hard to measure a amorphous solid. This is about a quarter for each. One probably has, those two probably have more. This one's gonna go in the corner, so I actually do want it to be a little bit smaller. This one's going to be green. This is a soap that I made before and someone has put it in a wholesale order for a whole batch of it. So I'm making the same so that they ordered it has green and then white, purple and yellow in diagonal stripes with a little bit of a feathered line between them. That's what we'd be making today. In other videos, I'll show you some other techniques that you can use for your design. This still has a lot of color in it, so I'm just going to put my gloved finger in and scoop it out of there. Stir it up. There's my yellow. Then last one will be the purple. Give it just a little extra skirt, make sure there isn't a clay just sitting on the bottom and then pour it in. Again. Some got stuck a little bit, so I'm just going to help it out. Stir it up. 18. Procedure: Designs And Molding: Creative Ideas: Then I'm going to use my mold. And I'm going to put all of the green into this side of the corner. Oh, on this wall in the corner of the malt. I got the green all in the corner there. Then next I'm going to put in this white or plain soap. I'm kind of putting it on a diagonal on top of the green. I'm also going to smooth it out with the edge of this spatula. If you look inside though, you'll see there is still some soap in the crock-pot and I'm leaving it there intentionally. The soap is a little bit harder than I would like. I don't want to use it because I know it's going to leave big white splotches spots. So I'm just gonna leave it in there. Then I'm going to pop the purple in on top also on a diagonal. Then I'm going to drop it one time so that it kind of all shifts to the bottom, bring all the soap down and push any air bubbles up and out the top. I have the purple in there. It's unlike a slight slant. I'm going to use my spatula to help it be on a little bit more of a slant. And then next I'm going to put that yellow in. This one. Even though I'm putting it in the purple was on a diagonal. I'm trying to straighten out the top because they still want the top of it to be square. Like a bar of soap are kind of flat like a bar of soap. I'm flattening it out a little bit with my spatula. I'm also going to pick it up and drop it a couple of more times. Right now I'm scraping along the sides to help get everything into the mold. Here we go. Choose. Then I'm gonna use this swirling tool. And I'm just going to go down and up with it. Sometimes you use it in circles, sometimes you use it in zigzags, use sometimes you just get super freestyle and do whatever you feel in the moment. But this one is kind of a more controlled method. I'm just going to drop it in close to the edge of the mold, drop it all the way to the bottom when I feel it hit. Then we move it over a tiny bit to the left and bring it up. Then bring it over next to that and drop it down again. Then lift it up over and down. So it's kind of it's making pattern like this. I'll put a picture in the final lecture. Here's the pattern you'll make with your swirling tool for the feathered stripes, look. Now I have some weird lines. I'm going to swap it on the table a few more times to help it out. And right now I'm holding the edges of the mold towards the woods to help make sure it stays straight instead of going through. That's a wrap for this beautiful loaf of soap. Here's how it turned out. Here's another way that you can use this whirling tool. Here's how it turns out. I think this swelling technique I'm about to show you is a great place to start. So I have some white, yellow, and red, and I have my mode here. I'm just going to plop a little bit of each color so that there's some variety in every layer of the soap. So here's how it started with yellow. And I'm doing some white, some red mixture. Keep going until you've used up all this up. Every now and then, give it a little tap on the table to help all this hope settled down. My soap mode is pretty full. And then we're gonna do some designs. So I brought this spoon along a very handy tool. There are a few options which I'll kind of model outside. First, you can kind of do bunny hops along the soap. You would go Like along a line here and then through the middle and then over this side, just moving it and that helps dispersed the soap and bring it into a kind of design. Or you can do like spirals will do both. First bunny hops. This part is coming out a little bit, so just tuck it back in. And then I'm going to do some spirals as well. If you get too crazy with your mixing and your designs, then you'll end up mixing them into each other, not just mixing them through each other into a design. So you want to be careful to be a little bit, to hold back a little bit, even though you really want to keep mixing. Just going to clean up the edges a little. Tap it down, and I'm gonna pop it in the freezer. This video shows that same swirling technique from above. Here's how it turned out. Next is one of my favorite design techniques. It's called the in the pot swirl. Actually already put the center in here, so that's good to go. Then I'm going to scoop out some of this soap into my measuring cup. Approximately a third of what's in here. Then I'm going to mix my colorant in, pour the color. And then when it's mixed and we're gonna put it back in the crockpot. I'm going to try to look for a spot that's not right on top of the rest of this up because I want to pick another color. I'm going to just scoop it back in and then take some more, so bad. Perfect. This time I'm going with pink red startup. Then when it's all mixed and nice, pink red. Then they've also put this one back in the crockpot. Have a nice mess of soap just sitting in there. And I'm gonna use my spatula and stirred up a little bit. But the key thing is not disturb it so much that at all actually mixes together and becomes a muddy color. You want to just stir it a little bit so it kind of swirls around itself, but it doesn't mix. That was it. And then just flop it into the mold. It's ready to go in the freezer. This video shows the in the plots swirled from above. Here's how the in the pots world turned out. For other kinds of molds and in the parts where it works best. I'll move a little bit of this soap over here. And I have an indigo pattern that I kind of pre mixed with some oil. Then I'll move it back over to the crockpot. Give it a little bit of a swirl, then scoop some are I like to press it into the mold to be sure that it gets to the bottom. I'll pop this whole thing in the freezer. 19. Procedure: Let It Solidify In The Mold: That's a wrap for this beautiful loaf of soap. What I'm gonna do with this now is stick it in the freezer to let it harden up. Putting it in the freezer helps it just like get extra solid and extra hard and it makes it a little bit easier to take it out of the mold. So I'm gonna leave it in the freezer overnight and tomorrow morning I'm gonna take it out. You could also just leave it out on the table or on the counter. You might want to put something over it so that it doesn't get anything dropped in it. But put it in a safe space. But you can definitely put it out. It doesn't have to go in the freezer. I just like to put my name in the freezer because I find it's easier to take it out of the mold later. Here I go. I'm off to put it in the freezer. Congratulations. You just made your first batch of hot process soap. I'm so happy and so proud of you. Great job. All that's left now is doing these dishes. I'm probably getting out this crockpot soak overnight because some of this harder or white soap who is going to be a little bit stuck or on the edges. But the rest of these dishes I'm going to wash right now. They're not caustic anymore. The lie should be all cooked out of them and they should be safe as long as they're cool, they should be okay for you to touch and wash. Tomorrow we'll take the soap out of the freezer and unfold it and then cut it. And I'm also going to stamp it. Then we can use it. It's so exciting. See you then. 20. Procedure: Unmolding: If you're using a loaf mode like this one, take the wooden box off first so you can work with just the silicone part. Be gentle with the corners because they're the part that's easiest to bump and hardest to fix. Your soap was in the freezer, let it defrost before you try to cut it. For other kinds of modes, you can just put a couple of fingers on the back and push them out. Then once they're out, you can trim off some of these excess pieces. You can do more when it's defrosted and smooth it out a little bit to you. Just put your fingers on the backend, pop it out. 21. Procedure: Cutting Bars: I'm ready to cut some soap. I have four lobes of soap here that have come out of the mold. And they're just like a big old block of soap. So I need to cut them into bars. And I have this tool that's a soap cutting box. It has divots on the side for the blades to go into this. But I've found with this box that it's actually not great. Because when I'm doing the straight blade, there's enough space that it can still move. So I still sometimes get a diagonal cut. The wood on this box is soft, so sometimes I slice into the wood and it's just not really cutting it for me. If I were shopping again for a soap cutter, I would get one of the wire cutters. It has just like a thin wire and it just goes straight down over it and it goes and it cuts it for you. But the way I use this one is I put this open and I kind of use it as a guide to help me know where to Mark. I just put a little impression in the top to help me see where I will cut. Then afterwards I'm going to freehand it because I find that it's actually more straight and more reliable than this soap cutting box. I'm putting my marks on the top. You can see I've got little lines on the along the top. Then I'm also going to put them on one side because that will help me make sure that when I'm freehand cutting it, it come right down over the same line. I've got little marks on the side is allowed. Personally, I actually like to alternate between the crinkled cutter and the flat cutter so that I have one side that's flat where I can put my logo stamp. And then on the other side I have this kind of crinkly curvy edge that feels really nice on this scan. Line up my cutter on the little divot that I made and I make sure that I'm looking at the side. And then I just push it straight down and I can check on the side to make sure that I'm going in a straight line. And then I have a bar of soap. Let's do some more. This one, you can see a kind of bright white spot. That's where the soap got a little bit hot in the crock-pot and it was that matt white That's along with outside edge first when it gets a little bit too hot in it over a cooks. So it left a little bit of a mark on this one. But I'm kind of okay with it. I have some white spots in this soap in general along with this worlds. So that will be fine. Then for this particular soap cutter, the last piece ends up being bigger than all the other pieces. But it doesn't, it doesn't have enough divots to go for the whole bar. So when I'm on the last one, I stick it back in the box and marketing those little imprints so that I know where I'm going to freehand it. Then. Cut off that last little bit. Now I have ten bars of soap. I have these other three lopes to cut to go. You could always go freehand with a knife for cutting your soaps as well. 22. Looking Ahead: Using Your Soap: Now that you've made yourself, you probably want to take good care of it. Have you heard of a soap savor? It looks kind of like a sponge and it kind of serves a similar purpose. It allows the water to drain out of the bottom from under your soap. Into your soap isn't sitting in a pool of water, slowly disintegrating. It's a fun tool. Another tip, don't put yourself in a spot that's in it in the direct line of the water of your shower. That's another quick way to make yourself disappear in a hurry. Also, if you have a lot of bars of soap, store them in a cool place out of direct sunlight where they can get a little bit of airflow to. 23. Looking Ahead: Troubleshooting Ideas + Start a Discussion for Help: Troubleshooting. So if your soap really tends to volcano and it's not okay with you, maybe consider heating the solid oils and butters on the stove separately in a double boiler at a really low temperature. So they're just barely melted. And then put them with the other oils in the crockpot, but don't even turn it on until after you've added the lie that will help keep the temperature cooler. And then hopefully it won't be as explosive. Also right from the start after you've mixed it, that's the best time to watch it in the bowel. The first ten or 15 minutes is when mine tends to volcano the most. And you'll start to see it'll be a pale yellow and it'll just be kind of pulsing and really expanding rapidly. And that's the best time to stir before it gets up to the top. When it's more stable, it'll be kind of a darker yellow and not as foamy and fluffy looking. If you feel like your soap is getting a little bit too hard and it's not staying liquidy for designs like you would like, you can try splitting the water and putting half the water in at the start with the lie and save the other half of the water to put in at the very end, I recommend making it hot to add to this soap so that it doesn't shock the soap and harden it right away when you add it either. Another option is trying to seal the lid of the crockpot with Saran wrap or plastic wrap, but not as much moisture can leak in vapor form from your crock-pot with your colorants if you picked to add water, but actually you're coloring is not water-soluble. It will sit in little chunks on top of the water and it won't dissolve. So this has happened to me before with my black clay, I thought that it would be water-soluble like the other clays, but it just wasn't. So I just added the oil as well and mixed it up. It's not ideal to put in both more water and more oil, but it's not going to ruin your batch either. Don't stress. If you're struggling with anything else along the way, please ask a question in the discussions tab. I'm happy to help you with troubleshooting. 24. Looking Ahead: More Additives: There are also lots of other additives that you can put into your soap like coffee grounds. Colloid oatmeal, which is like ground-up oatmeal. Salt, loofah as honey, a little bit of coconut milk or coconut cream, add some nice nourishing moisture. Little pieces of chopped up herbs or flowers. There's so many choices. Just make sure that you don't pick pieces that are too big because they can mold inside of your soap. And also I wanted to share that. It's also an option to use like coffee or a tea instead of water with your lie. But if you decide to do that, make sure that you make the coffee or tea ahead and then chill it. Because when the water and the light come together, they heat up. And if the coffee or tea is already hot and then it heats up more, it can cause problems for your soap, but totally get creative, add tons of fun things. 25. Looking Ahead: Packaging Your Soap To Share: If you have a soap stamp that you want to use, you'll put this stamp in the center of the soap. Then put your hands on and kind of rock the stamp back and forth both ways. And then turn it and rocket up and down. Take a stamp of motor planning on sharing your soaps with friends and family. Here are a couple of ideas for your gifting. Sometimes I tie a bow just right around the soap with a little twine. Sometimes they use a little paper bag and I just pop the soap inside. Then seal it up with a sticker. Then they get a little surprise. I also love wax paper bags for this. And another idea is to use a little organs, a gift bag. And just pop this open. Close it up. And that makes a cute little gift trouble. 26. Looking Ahead: Intro To Making Your Own Recipes: Making your own soap recipes could pretty much be a whole course on its own. But I'm going to share a couple of resources here that might help if you're feeling enthusiastic. One is about different kinds of oils and their different properties. And another one is called soap, the soap calculator. And it will help you look at the different proportions and see if your soap is a good mix of the different. Remember we talked about the fatty acids and how they have different properties. So the SOC calculator will help you see if the properties of your soap are overall a good balance. And then you can look at the different properties of different oils and then change them to try to bring different proportions of different benefits to your soap. Here's a tiny hint. First, I wanted to show you this post, the beginner's guide to soap making oils that comes from the Sobe green.com, which is an amazing resource with tons of tutorials and different ideas and troubleshooting posts for soap and Kendall making an all kinds of other related projects. In this post it talks about all kinds of different oils. It starts with the name of the oil and then how long the shelf life is for the oil, how long you can keep it. Then it will tell you about what's great about the oil, what nourishing properties that has and what it adds to soap. Like this one feels silky and moisturizing. It's packed with vitamins E and a or avocado butter. His creamy and it makes the skin feels smooth and moisturized. And then also in this article, the next thing it tells you is how much you can add it to soap. Like this one is 33% or up here it says generally used at 20% or less. Those site also shares some of their own recipes that use each oil. If you're looking at this site and you pick out some oils that you think would be great and soap, you choose the percentages, then you can bring your DIY recipe over to these soap calculator. When you get to the soap calc website, you'll click recipe calculator. From there it will show you this calculator. And the green fields are things that you can change and white are already set. So the first question is, what kind of lie you're using? This one is sodium hydroxide live the one that we used than the weight of the oils were going to measure ours and ounces and then water as a percentage of oils, you can leave that preset super fat. You can add extra oils when you're making soap to make it just a little bit more nourishing, fragrance, how much you want to add. And then these are soap qualities. This makes a nice rounded bar of soap, not rounded physically but rounded in its properties. Then here you choose which oils you wanted to use. I'm going to fill in the oils from the recipe that we used. But you, if you made a different recipe from looking at the soap queen list of oils, then you would put them in here. We have all men oil, castor oil, cocoa butter, coconut oil, olive oil. Then you can choose either by percentage or by how many ounces you're going to do. In this case, I'm gonna do ounces because I know that recipe by heart. But if you were just starting on your recipe and you had come up with those oils, you might know the percentage instead of the number of ounces that you wanted. For almond oil, we have eight ounces castor oil, cocoa butter for ten ounces, cocoanut oil, ten ounces of olive oil. Then we can check our work by clicking calculate recipe. And then next you'll click view or print recipe and a new tab will open. Then in your new tab, it shows the number of ounces that we put in for the oil's down here, and our total number of oils before cooking. Then also tells you how many ounces of water would go with the amount of oils that you picked and the amount of lie that you would need to go with the oils that you chose and the fragrance. How much fragrance To button? This is an ounces or grams. So you could use your kitchen scale to measure the fragments as well. These are some of those fields that we had at the top that we didn't change. It's sort of a more advanced section. Then down here at the bottom, it tells us about the quality of the bar. You can see that it's green all the way across here. Because our recipe is within the range of each of these qualities. For example, for hardness, you would want to borrow between 2954 and ours is at 38. So that falls in the range. But if you wanted it harder, but you could look at the oils back on the oil page and see which ones add to a hardness. And then change the recipe. Either add more of the oil that increases hardness or substituted out for another one of the oils. But you have to keep in mind the percentages that are appropriate for each oil. So it's a little bit complicated, but an exciting tool. It's something that for me at least was a lot of trial and error and testing different recipes and different proportions in different ratios. And slowly coming to the point where this is all green and everything is within the range to make a beautiful Barb soap. I hope this helps if you're excited about making your own recipes and have fun with it, enjoy getting creative and experimenting. One other idea I wanted to share with you is if you wanted to make this recipe bigger or smaller, you could go back to the silk calc page and re-enter all of your numbers. Or if you wanted to double this recipe, you can double the amount of water. So instead of 12.54, you'd have 25.08 double the amount of lie, double the amount of olive oil. Since there are eight, you'd have 16 all the way down. You double all of the ingredients that you're putting into the soap. As long as you keep the ratio and the proportions the same, you're all set with your recipe. 27. Congratulations! You Did It!: Congratulations you did it. I really hope that you enjoyed this course. I really loved to hear how it went for you and even see some of the soaps that you made for your class project upload a photo of your finished soap and let us know what colorants and since you chose, share anything you struggled with and any breakthroughs you may have had too. Here's a look back at everything we've been through together. So happy that I got to share this with you. And I really hope that you're enjoying making lots of beautiful, creative handmade soaps. That's a wrap for now, but keep your eye out because I've always got some other ideas of my sleeves. See you soon. For more from me, visit lather and Light Co.com. See you there.