Hello, my name's Anne and I've been making M&P soap for about 8 years or so, bath bombs and bubble bars too.  In fact, anything that smells good!  Oh and I make the Shake n Vac stuff for making carpets smell yummy too.....   

I do want to learn to make "proper" soap (not intended to cause offence to M&P soapers cos I'm one of em lol) from scratch.  Can anyone point me in the direction of a recipe which will take me by the hand and show me exactly what to do - and an easy recipe?  I do have a crock pot if that helps any?

Anne   :buttrf:

Hello and welcome aboard.

There's a crockpot hot process tutorial here in Resources and tips here


Thenyou'll need Soapcalc -
http://www.soapcalc.net/calc/soapcalcwp.asp as it's always a good idea to run any recipe you find through it.

There are loads of recipes on the web - but many are US so you really need to convert to grams for UK/Europe.

Hello and welcome.  :buttrf:

Hello Anne and welcome!    :buttrf:

You'll love this place, it's filled with fun and friendly people.

Hi Anne,
Welcome to the forum. A combination of equal amounts of coconut,olive and palm is a good place to start - made even better with the addition of say, 10% castor oil. Lots of other lovely oils and butters to experiment with, but this combination makes a lovely soap to start with.
Scott

hello and welcome, you've definitely come to the right place if you want to make soap !!
 :buttrf:

I tried to go to the crock pot tutorial but it wouldn't let me log in; it says it's a private area.  Do I need a separate log in for this?  I'm anxious to get all the ingredients ready for next weekend when I'm going to give it a go!
Anne

Welcome 

Hello and welcome... :buttrf:

hey there!

Welcome 

I'm not sure about this - I use the same login details as for the forum.

Try creating an Account on the main site (using same name and password as for here).

(Kes will know).

Hi & welcome!  Good luck with the soapmaking, let us know how it goes!
I used this tutorial when I started & found it very helpful.  http://www.soap-making-essentials.com/cold-process.html  It is for CP (cold process) so no crockpot needed.

I'd start with a 3 oil recipe, try the one Scott suggested, if you go to soap calc, set weight to grams & enter 1000.  (This will give you a kilo of oils, you could use less but it's a nice round figure to work with.)  Leave everything else as it is.  Then click on oils from the list to create your recipe, in this case coconut (76 deg), olive and palm.  Enter either amount or % in the relevant columns, say 30% coconut, 35% each of palm & olive.  Press 'calculate recipe' then 'view/print recipe' - it will open in a seperate window.  This will tell you how many grams of water, lye & oils to use- you may have to round the lye amount to fewer decimal places!
HTH!  

(You do need to create a seperate log-in for the main site to access some of the articles.)

Welcome :buttrf:

Thank you - I had to create a separate log in but I found it!  Thank you!  Where do you folks buy palm oil BTW?  I found some on eBay but for 1Kg it was £3.50 - add postage at £4.50!  And what sze stainless steel pan will I need (I believe the pan has to be stainless steel?)  They are pretty expensive too!
Anne