Thanks so much ginganinja30. I have to admit I was a little down this morning but now happy for a lot of different reasons.
Good morning Jim, I'm glad your spirits are up a bit more now.
You are never alone on 420 magazine and there are many willing shoulders to help carry any burdens ..
I started my pain cream this morning by decarbing some buds.
Into a 250
o F oven for slightly longer than 30 minutes went an assortment of Blue Dream, Sugar Mango, Panama and some bag seed I grew; weighing in at 54.3 grams. I'll use 15% THC as my percentage if I choose to try to determine any potency. There's a calculation formula of this somewhere.
That sounds like it's going to be an amazing mixture of medicine right there Jim .
After decarbing I mixed the herb with 24 ounces of Grape Seed Oil and 1 Tablespoon of liquid Sunflower Lecithin. It's currently in a Crock Pot water bath on the HIGH setting. It will be there for 4 hours.
I'm not even sure why Lecithin is needed for a pain cream as it's primarily for bioavailablilty and I guess that includes absorption.
I'm not too sure about the reasoning for lecithin for topical application but it can't hurt so let's get experimenting.
Maybe on your next batch if you run it the same without the lecithin for comparison on your pain relief. Everything has a learning moment to me so this will be very interesting.
When this process is complete I'll stain the oil through some cheese cloth and it will go into a double boiler so I can add some bees wax to make the cream. Supposedly, the bees wax should be no more than 8% of the end product so I'll need to do some sort of calculation when I get all of the oil out. I want the cream to be creamy and I have nothing that I can think of to blend it other than a spoon. We'll just see how it goes. More to follow for sure.
Yes that's the information I have re: no more than 8% beeswax.
Are you looking to get that nice creamy texture as your preference as I just usually skip this step as the oil itself can absorb quicker without.
The wax/coco butter/shea butter etc does add a nice feel to the skin and smell too. It's all about preference at the end of the day ..
A spoon will mix it together just fine Jim.
It'll take a couple of moments of cooling to check consistency that works for you, little amounts of wax added at a time. You can always add more but can't take it out.
While I was selecting the buds used here I found jars of Chemdawg and Jack Herer. Both of these strains along with Blue Dream are my "go to" buds and I had bad thoughts of running out.