Milk of lime, making lime hides when comes from barrel bug

When I was trying to make lime hides from using milk of lime that was stored in a barrel it made my first lime hide and then my second, which were dried snake skins from stumps, and then I was moving on to dried rabbit skin which then made it stop highlighting the buckets when 1 was 10/10 full and the other was just slightly depleted. I kept throwing the milk of lime back and trying to get it again to no avail. However when I made my milk of lime by using water and one of my lime and it never touched the barrel it worked perfectly fine.