u/QueenOfHolidays

New soaper here. I made my 4th batch of CP yesterday and had something weird happen.

This was a beer batch - which I’ve done before without issue. Beer was left out to eliminate carbonation and boiled/simmered. Then frozen.

When I slowly poured my lye onto the frozen beer and stirred, I noticed some “chunks” on the spoon as I was stirring. Hmmm. After all the beer ice melted, I noticed the bottom of the container was a rock hard layer of something. I tried breaking the layer up with my spoon - which mostly worked - but still had some chunks. So I removed those chunks and put them into another container and tried for quite a while to break up the chunks. That eventually worked. That whole process of smashing the chunks took half an hour!

Does anyone know why that happened? I’ve made 3 other batches with beer and wine and that had never happened before. Same lye. Same process (boiling/freezing).

I'm making my very first batch of WINE SOAP today and am torn about the color. While the wine itself is a beautiful deep reddish burgundy, the soap will supposedly be more of a brownish/caramel color.

I've played around with mixing various mica hues to find the color I want. S

Question: Should I just SWIRL a bit of that reddish color into the soap mix or color the entire loaf that reddish color? I've watched videos doing both ways.

I have read that red soap will give you red lather tho. Any suggestions?

Hi all! I'm making my first batch of red wine soap and was hoping to find the perfect scent from Bramble Berry.

Any suggestions?

I'm hoping someone can help me.

While I've made melt and pour soaps, I decided to take the plunge and try cold process soaps - a palm-free recipe.

I've been spending days and days and days trying to find a recipe for my very first CP soap.

My questions:

1. I plug the values into both the Bramble Berry and SoapCalc's calculators and despite having the same amounts, the lye and water amounts are different. So which one am I supposed to use?

2. Usage rates.... For example, coconut oil states you can use up to 33% yet many recipes call for more than that. What?

I am just looking for a SIMPLE palm-free recipe. I'd like to use Coconut oil, olive oil, castor oil and shea butter with 5% superfat and fragrance.

Can anyone help me? Does anyone have a simple recipe for those ingredients? I'm ready to pull my hair out!

Whoo hoo! My first eval was today. So of course I've been checking my account since the middle of the night - just in case. My stats were 100% and Excellent but was still on edge since I've never had an evalualtion before.

This afternoon, saw the msg my account was under review and could take 96 hours. So just checked my Vine Account and got this beautiful little messsage. Ain't it beautiful?

Checked my RFY page and have 2 items over $200 and one over $100! While they aren't anything I'm interested in, was still awesome to finally see.

https://preview.redd.it/43tqnts8ok5h1.jpg?width=795&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a5e36c35712ea079c6e7c5e9c4b79b919778fd7f

My first eval is in 10 days. According to my stats…:

Reviewed: 123 products.

Review to Order Ratio: 100 percent.

Insightfulness: Excellent

I have one product I’ve been waiting on for over a month. It is supposed to be here Friday. I’ll review it right away If I actually get it.

1. While I’ve reviewed every item I’ve gotten, all reviews have been approved, but many are still pending. Does that “quality score” mean anything in the review process or is it only the “review status” that matters?

2. I haven't ordered much of anything for the past two weeks - because I’m super cautious. IF I find something in the next 10 days I simply can’t live without, how would one item not reviewed actually impact my 100% score?