chuck_35550

I'm looking at Apple & Pumpkin Streudel, Bora Bora, Cedar Sage & Blackberry, Honeysuckle and White Patch? Thanks for any help, Steve

Try pouring at 185 to 190 degrees and monitor the temp from your pour pot. You should get a bit of pull away at the wick, which can be fixed with a heat gun. Those look like a combination of jump lines and loss of adhesion. Weird that they occur identically. HTH Steve

I liked 415 better than 464 but didn't choose either wax. You're going to get different opinions from both sides but the real answer is to order slabs and test for yourself..

Oddly enough, I don't get the tan coloration. The color of the finished goat/lye mixture is a light lemon color (never orange) and depending on the formulation can come out very white. The greatest drawback is how the sugars in the milk speed up saponification if over blended. A bare emulsion helps but more often than not I over do the sb and get thick soap (that old chestnut). Steve

I buy my goat milk at Wally World but when using powdered milks I like to be heavy handed with it. Whatever your water amount in the formula, add another 1/2 amount of the powder for a nice rich soap. You can mix up a quart or so and keep it in the fridge for a good long time. I never insulate milk soaps and in fact you might stick the soap in the fridge. I place my goat milk in a steel bowl and then place the bowl down in ice. Pour in your goat milk and stick a thermometer in it. Pour in the lye a little at a time and stir, making sure that the temp never exceeds 100 degrees. Once you have mixed in all your lye and the temp is about 50 or 60 degrees you can move it off the ice. Pour directly into your oils and don't worry if your oils are warmer than your lye solution. Watch the temp again and make sure it doesn't exceed 100 degrees. Divide your soap, add color and swirl. You should have plenty of time to swirl if your oils and fos are not fast moving. You get a rich soap that makes your skin feel silky smooth and clean. HTH Steve

Vanilla based bakery frgragrances are the bane of both chandlers and soapers. Vanillin just causes all kinds of problems in an otherwise ok system. Candles really soot in rooms where you have an overhead fan or other types of air movement that make the flame flicker. Severe sooting is a poorly wicked candle but light sooting is to be expected as a bi-product of combustion. Soy sooting is just not as profound but most certainly exists. If you are determined to use a fragrance that throws well and is a good seller; switch wick types until you find the one that works the best and produces the least amount of sooting and or mushrooms. You burn something it makes smoke. I only buy fos that can be used for candles and not for soaping as well. The fomulations rarely are strong enough for two different applications (IMHO) and they don't seem to operate as well as fos specifically designed for one use. Try almond based fragrances with a little vanilla or cherry fragrances that can fill a room easily but don't require a whole lot of vanillin. HTH Steve

Its just too risky to sell anything to the public. Art project wise, you could pour the melted wax into different silicone ice tray molds that are usually at wally world, Hobby Lobby or Michaels. Use botanicals to give texture (dried plant material) or even use colored glass stones, shells or other items to make decorative pieces. A bag of shells and then fill the shells with the wax or small clay pots with a little citronella for outdoors on patios or around pools. I bought some small ceramic shell pots at Dollar Tree one year and plugged up the holes with hot glue and poured blue, rain scented wax into them for neat candles. Buy a little extra fragrance oil (Michaels or Hobby Lobby) and mix in a different complimentary fragrance, as well as a little color and be creative. You can buy silicone letters and numbers, string them together on some jute and spell out names or the school name and tie them on hooks (either vertically or horizontally) for room fragrancers. Soy wax will be too soft. If its nice and hard paraffin wax, you should be able to work all kinds of magic. HTH Steve

I have a white soap formula that produces a very white soap without having to use td. Buy one of those little hand mixers for better dispersion, they're cheap but work real well. HTH Steve

I use sugar shakers. Works great and fairly cheap.

I didn't mean to come off sounding rude on my post. You have the best minds on this question (excludes me) and it sounds challenging to someone with no knowledge of liquid soapmaking. Good luck with your quest. Steve

Crisco comes from the good old days wnen you only had a few choices with paraffin waxes. Today's Crisco is hydrogenated soybean oil, palm oil and would most likely junk up your wicking more than anything else. People used to put about a tablespoon per pound for improved throw with paraffin. I have used coconut with my parasoy and with paraffin votive wax. About 1 tsp per pound or maybe a tablespoon at most. It helps with appearance and hot throw was marginal. Vybar can lock your scent out but I personally don't have any experience with that additive. I would suggest you try other waxes, rather than trying to make the 464 do what you want with costly additives. JMO Steve

I use a shot glass with markings on the side that tell you increments of ounces (up to 2) and place it on my scale. The reasib that I'm careful with amounts is because of the cost. A pound of quality oil plus shipping, increases the cost of pproduction and that increase is my cost. I don't pass it on to the consumer becaue they won't pay it. Keeping cost down is a constant battle, whether you are selling or not.

I like a small amount (1tsp pp) in paraffin votive wax because it makes them really shiny and come out of the molds better. I have used it in parasoy when the quality of soy was poor due to drought conditions. Sometimes I've used petrolatum to help with brittle soy but 99% use no additive. Steve

Dividing 15 ounces into 1 ounce gives you 6.66% as the amount of fragrance oil in your solution. You don't add the ounce back into the wax amount (15 not 16). Hope that clears things up. Most people add one ounce to 16 ounces which is not a big whoop when pouring into 8 oz jars, unless you take into account that an 8 ounce jar comfortably holds 7 ounces (depending on the design) and that my application is 8 ounces into a 12 ounce salsa jar. That jar comfortably holds 8 ounces of wax and makes a good appearance with the label. I never pour wax past the neck of a jar (where it begins to slope upward) because of adhesion and safety. The 12 ounce jar is labeled as an 8 ounce candle. I typically pour 12 ounces into the 16 ounce salsa. I hope this makes sense. Steve

If you weigh everything out correctly, you should have very little if any leftovers. I use a 15 oz wax with one ounce fragrance oil to fill two 8 oz jars or one 16 oz jar and there is zero left over. This ususally works real well with those one ounce samplers for testing. My wife is sensitive to the concentrated fumes of multiple fragrance oils and has gotten really ill on several occasions. I try to pour when she isn't home or to open a window with a fan blowing outward and close doors. She hates florals and can tolerate some bakery if they aren't too strong. Its just that you really pollute the indoor air with those contrated fumes. Pure soy was a huge pain for me and using a parasoy turned out to be the best of both words (soy-paraffin). Good luck and have fun. Steve

That isn't enough information (amounts/percentages) and I've never heard the term "rot". I can't tell if you're joking, trolling or if you're serious. You want cream soap to be firm but not too creamy?

Sounds like ash. DOS takes awhile to develop and you get a smell off of it. It could be specks of titanium diozide if you used that but you did say that the butters were fully melted and incorporated?

I take it that the yogurt or coconut milk is a percentage of your liquid? By the way, I think that's the song title to a JImmy Buffett song! Steve

If you're really brave, do the zap test. Lick a soap bar with your tongue and if it doesn't zap or burn, its ok.

I stack em up in the toaster oven on my work bench and then dump the melted wax out and then put them in a sink of very hot water with Dawn dish washing liquid for a soak. It would be easier if I did that about once a month but instead it builds up to several cases before they're cleaned. NEVER THROW ANYTHING AWAY.........EVER!!!!! You always wind up finding a use for stuff that stacks up in the lab. HTH Steve

Oh yeah. The best ones are those that have been neatly bundled and kept together with a rubber band or a tie. Its so much easier to just pull a wick out of a bundle, as well as, you can see how many wicks are left and when to re-order. Just straighten em out and bundle em up, takes about 5 minutes and make sure your bag is labeled with the correct size. Now you know who not to order from again.

That's how a candle works. You light a wick to provide enough heat to melt the wax and release the fragrance into the surrounding air. When pouring a candle into a container, the wax shrinks as it cools and sometimes causes a dip around the wick which can cause a small cavity from the wick pulling away. Heating the left over wax about ten degrees hotter and covering the top, fills in any holes and levels the top around the wick. The old J waxes (J-50, J-223) were the first blended paraffins that everyone used for container candles. I'm old school and prefer the J waxes, especially the 223 for a great cold and hot throw. The down side is that they tend to smoke and soot the jars if not properly wicked. Zinc wicks work the best IMHO. You need to test for yourself and continue to research by reading this board and others. HTH Steve

I use Clarus 3022 70% soy and 30% paraffin. About 7 years now I think. Steve

I've noticed it on a few fragrances. It seemed like the tester was better quality than the pound bottle and the only explanation might be that the formulation changed after the tester was sent out for some reason. There are periodic shortages of some raw materials or dramatic price increases, which would force a slight change in the formulation. But yes, I have noticed this before. Steve

Chinese glass is a reality. Until China decides to enforce quality control in manufactoring; you can expext cheap, poorly made products. That being said, I have had poor sales results using colored glass containers. The same rule applies whether the wax or container is colored "colors have to match the decor of the room". Customers seem more interested in picking out a fragrance than trying to struggle with color as well. A white candle in a classy jar works 100% of the time. Occasionally, someone will ask if they can get a fragrance poured in a color. Custom candles are no big deal and are rarely requested in my area. Being stuck with colored tumblers for the rest of time may not be in your best interest in the long run. The main consideration today is whether the customer can bear the added cost of colored glass. Steve