Soaping!

Here is what happens when a chemical engineer with an interest in all things craft, homegrown and homemade has too much time on her hands. I started soap making a few months ago and I think I'm really hooked. I'm not comfortable giving out recipes or methods, the rest of the world wide web will do that for you just fine. But let me tell you about the goodness and fun that's happened with a few surprisingly simple ingredients! 

It's actually a whole lot like cooking. Except when I cook, I never really follow the recipe. And in soap making, you must follow the recipe to a T. This is where my many years of lab training come in handy, too. It's useful to be aware of where your hands are and what they've touched in the process, since lye is involved and lye is really corrosive.

Soap is basically made by combining some liquid and solid fats with lye, and then the fun starts. The additives! Today, I made a kitchen bar that I'll call 'Lemony Lather' because it has homegrown lemon balm, dried lemon zest and all sorts of wonderful essential oils with citrus notes. 

The herb and citrus zest give the soap a fun texture and a tiny bit of scrubbing action. The soap is wonderful to get the kitchen smell of one's hands. I pour the custardy soap mix into an enamel dish that I'm using as a soap mold. Those antique photography trays are so extremely useful, enamel is like glass, very unreactive and stable.

 The second bar of the night will be a very minimalist 'castille type' soap with nothing but coconut and olive oils. I'm hoping it will replace the kids' body wash, we shall see how that will go down.

 When done mixing, soap needs to sit in a warm, undisturbed spot for a day. I cover it, put it under the piano, and wrap it nicely with an old wool blanket. It will be cut tomorrow while in a still-kind-of-soft state, and then sit on a basement shelf to cure.

 To bridge that gap, you can take a look at some older soaps, starting with a 'gentle glitter' bar that has shimmery mica in it, for sensitive skin.

 

I experimented with a vegan and palm-oil free very moisturizing oat meal bar, my first time trying this neat marbled coloring. It's not a pretty bar, came out kinda dingy looking, but really nice on the hands.

  

The first iteration of the kitchen bar had rosemary and lemon balm, and looks like this after being cut and cured for a few weeks:

This last one is my favorite soap so far: The Mocha Mud Bar. It's scrubby, thanks to coffee grounds, cinnamon and cocoa in the mix. Smells a little of cedarwood and cloves, too. It's the perfect clean-up soap after gardening. The photo is my first time trying my own soap, a big moment because the soap takes so long before it's safe to be used. Four weeks of learning... yeah. That again. Patience.