Common Problems in soap making continued:
Volcano is a fun one, if you fail to have both oils and lyewater when making CP at the right temperature, or at dramatically different temperatures when you add them together, it tends to explode as in turns into an instant volcano in your kitchen/workroom. A volcanic eruption happens to everyone from the noob to the pro if temperature measuring before mixing ingredients at lye stage is ignored. Expect full body lye-burns on any exposed area. If your wearing full body armor while cooking soap expect the stuff to just slop into every crevice and start burning you anyways. Everyone in the area though also takes damage from the volcano. I mentioned soaps were explosive earlier right? This is why modern soap makers are advised to wear loose fitting clothing, an long apron, long gloves, and a good-fitting fume-proof mask of some kind. The difference in temperature between mixture A and mixture B when you put them together is thought to be around 50 points Farenheight. Allowing mixtures to cool down for a few minutes before mixing lowers the risk of volcanoes happening.

Lye-heavy soap, if you fail to mix your oils and lye enough, and supposing you don't have a modern day stick blender yo! You can end up with slightly separated soap that goes to trace, and then has oils and lye that never mixed enough. Or maybe you didn't measure your oils properly and you end up with something lye-heavy. Despite the old adage that more lye makes a better cleaning soap, that's no longer true. Maybe for grating up and throwing in your sink to clear a drain but not for real cleansing properties. Certain oils actually create the cleansing power. Different oils have different different cleansing properties.

Oil-heavy soap, if you fail to measure properly or maybe you were doing a superfat and miscalculated the math you can end up with a soap that is oil-heavy. I've made oil heavy before, it took about 2 years for it to cure. So a much longer cure time than normal. Reminds gloppish in the mold and takes a very long time to properly set-up.

Both lye-heavy and oil heavy can be rebatched in a cauldron. In fact traditional soap making typically involved a cauldron, and a fire.

I believe that's it for bad stuff that can happen.

Okay so I'm going to cover basic soap making CP. Usually this involves some intense math, and it's not simply adding, it's multplying saponification values by weight and calculating the amount of distilled water and lye needed for the recipe each must be done separately usually we keep a table for that. With Dragonrealms having unique ingredients available there's going to probably be some variance in SAP valued for those ingredients.

So the basics.
Each oil, butter, and wax has an SAP value. This might be .036 for a light wax such as jojoba oil. All the way up to .865 for Beeswax which happens to be a very heavy wax. I tried making an SAP Elements table chart only to realize that many popular oils share the same SAP value in 3 digits, with some outliers jojoba, beeswax,and olive. So we just have charts. Oh! and I nearly forgot, depending on if you are using NaOH or KoH the numbers you need to use change! So sweet almond oil for NaOH is .137 on a SAP chart, but it becomes .194 on KoH. You need balance these values appropriately otherwise... lye heavy or oil heavy soaps may happen. Also the SAP values will change dependant on the publisher. So one person believes almond oil's SAP is .137, a more advanced soap maker might argue and sya noo... it's more like .143. This variation can attributed to impurities in the lye used, the strength of the lye used, and local weather abnormailites which may cause lye concentration to activate and slowly decay over time.

Tools
a mixing stick or spoon
a glass bowl or a steel pot
or a steel cauldron
a weight scale for measuring precise ingredients in stones
distilled water (ideal)
lye or potash
measuring cup


So before we start, we are going to purchase some lumps of fat from the society, and we are going to fill our cauldron with water. White Leaf Deer, White leaf cow, White leaf pig. So we are going to take 50 pounds of white leaf deer and put it into our cauldron over a fire. We are going to let our white leaf break down into deer grease by stirring, time and stirring. Now once it's all broken down into a soupy broth. We'll start skimming it directly into any container you want. a general store box would be just fine. It hardens into a soft white bar of deer butter. Sure you could buy deer butter from the society. It just costs a little less making it yourself.

Now taking your deer butter and putting it in a clean cauldron we melt it down to a soft simmer just below a boil. Next in a seaparate container we mix distilled water and lye together, and this point the water will boil by itself and you'll heave boiling hot lye water. Allow mixture to cool, but keep stirring so it doesn't separate out. Pour mixture slowly into cauldron with warmed deer oil, stirring slowly. Once all of your lye is in, put out the flame, and continue to stir, stir, stir. When you think the soap might be at trace, you can check it by lifting your spoon and swirling it around the pot letting the batter drip down. If it stays on top it's ready for pouring, if it sinks it needs more stirring.

At the point of reaching trace, you can then add pigments, oil based fragrances, seeds and decoratiions. You can also choose to divide soap batter and add separate colorants for swirling.

For example if I wanted a white vanilla soap with a chocolate brown swirl. I would divide the batch and add vanilla color stabilizer, 5-7 drops vanilla fragrance oil into one half, and into the other half I would add chocolate cocoa powder and 5-7 drops vanilla fragrance oil. I would mix each batch separately, and then pour them each into the single mold. Then I would swirl mold with stick to add swirling decorations. I would let it set for a little while and then I would take some wild daisy I had foraged or picked earlier, and I would sprinkle daisy onto mold. Which would then be I sprinkle some daisy petals onto the top of the mold.
Rest the mold for 2 days, and then I would unmold and using a kitchen knife I would cut it evenly into bar sized pieces. So I would have 6 bars of white vanilla soap with a chocolate brown swirl in the center lightly dusted with a topping of white daisy petals. Smell would be vanilla, sweet and floral.