You see this soap.. it looks good right.. but nope, I used a new pot and while I thought I saved it, that was not the case, it was ruined.. this is where all that soap ended up.. it could not even be re-soaped or used for laundry soap or floor scrubbing soap because the dang soap reacted to the new bigger pot I used and it went funky-and that’s me being kind..
My point of this post is simple.. not everything we do works, not everything we do turns out the way we expected, not everything is picture perfect.. Not everything can be saved or reused in someway.. sometimes things we do are just plain old failures and need to be sent to the rubbish bin! All 15 pounds of it..
The key is to do it.. learn from it…and then let it go and move on.. focus on NEXT! and you will enjoy life a whole lot more 🙂
Just another Day on the Farm 
Well, that totally sucks!
So, if I understand what you’re saying, the soap ingredients reacted badly with the new pot’s construction? If so, what kind of pots are safe for soap making and what material(s) should be avoided?
I normally use a old crock pot insert for my mixing pot, it fits my 2.5 or 3 pound batches perfectly but as this was a huge batch, I needed a different pot and went with what should have been a safe pot of steel but clearly something in the coating massively reacted with the lye, we were able to move it to a stock pot and I thought I had saved it, but whatever it eat in the first pot, was clearly reacting in the soap/lye even after 24 hours, and safety first..
I was wondering what sort of pot you used that caused the reaction. Ugh. I’ve had that happen before and it’s so frustrating. But you’re right, all you can do is learn and move on.
How deeply annoying, I think when i start I am going to make it using a crock pot, i have heard that works, but it will be little quantities at a time i think, 15 pounds is a terrible loss! c
Well to be fair this is the first time I have ever had a batch go bad to the point I could not rework it in some way, 99 percent of the time, you can save it somehow, it may not be pretty but it can still do its job, and if its really ugly, you just make it felted soap 🙂
But this was a case of a mistake on my part on the pot I made it in.. and boy did I pay for it, I have always used a crock pot before for my normal size batches but as I wanted to make six loafs of the very same, I went to untried pot, I did learn which pot to use, which is my stock pot.
Yes, it was a huge loss, not only because of the basic costs for soap but because I had such plans for this one, I used around 40 dollars worth of EO for it, in total I threw away around 80 dollars worth of cost materials which would typically retail for around 300 dollars worth of soap before tax if you had to buy it in the store.
I am on the horns, do I just make the smaller 2 to 3 pound batches and stay with what is working really well or do I spend a money and buy what I need to be able to properly move over to a 5 pound loaf..
For now at least, I expect that I will stay with the smaller loafs, as I have all the equipment and tools etc
How many pounds of ingredients would the large oval crockpots hold? Or is that what you’re already using? (I think my big one’s somewhere around 4.5-5 litres – liquid measure)
that’s the one I use and I safely make up to a 3 pound loaf