Soap for the skills fair

My local Transition group is planning a skill fair for Earth Day this spring (May 4th! Come by if you're local!) and I will be contributing my soap making wisdom, and hopefully have some samples for people to try. 

I made two bars a few days ago, a rosemary shampoo bar and the lemony lather kitchen bar I use all the time. Two days ago I decided on a one-and-a-half size batch of the favorite honey oatmeal flower petal bar that is my own recipe. It is vegan and palm-oil free, and really gentle to use. Scaling up the recipe got me a much better block to slice into bars - the sizing worked out well. I used a cardboard shoe box lined with cling wrap for a mold, could that get any easier? 

The bar is scented with rose, a hint of lavender, orange and vanilla, and has added chamomille flowers and ground oats for a tiny bit of scrubbiness in the final bar, but mostly, because adding in that stuff is the most fun part of soap making. I tinted half of the batter pink with a too-dark-for-me shade of mineral blush that has a hint of mica sparkle. Sparkle never hurts, does it?

Hair Dare!

I found myself at the mall this weekend and finally worked up that magic combination of courage and opportunity to donate my hair. Well, 10 inches of it. My oldest decided to follow suit, and was able to donate 8 inches of million-dollar-blonde mane. 

Of course this now presents us with new-to-us styling challenges so I went out to buy hair spray. I just had to take a picture - seriously, the hair care aisle is not a safe place for children. 2 sexy! Kinky! No, that isn't my commentary, those are the names of the products. Not your mother's beach babe, no kidding.

I made home-made rosemary mint shampoo bars as an antidote, stat. I used less coconut milk and an infusion of homegrown rosemary and mint instead of the water. See how I splurged on a fancy new soap cutter, too? The result smells delicious and has the added advantage of being PG.


 

It's not always roses and sunshine ...

... but sometimes it is! A few days ago I dried 2 trays worth of these cute, fragrant little spray roses

natural light at dusk

that I grow in my front yard. I ended up with just about 1/3 of a cup dried rose petals, and thought they'd be perfect for a honey oatmeal rose petal bar.

flash - how much more dramatic

I stuck to my own recipe that uses a nice combination of highly moisturizing oils, and is vegan and palm oil free. A hard to find combination. There are some sourcing issues related to palm oil and orangutans. I certainly wouldn't want to mess with apes that are bigger than me so I have made it a policy not to use palm oil in my soap making. 

 

I added a bit of rose, lavender and sweet orange essential oils and the end result looks good enough to eat! It will have to harden for quite a while (courtesy of the no palm, no lard recipe). Sadly, the rose petals didn't hold their color very much, which I had hoped they would. I still think they added to the wonderful scent though, and I like that there is something homegrown in this bar.

Then I made my first batch of shampoo bars. I slightly modified this recipe from Andrea @ frugallysustainable.com, and made it a Sunshine Shampoo with chamomile and lemon. I used the room temperature method, so I'll have to wait a few weeks to give this a try. I'm having high hopes it'll work for me and the kids!

If you liked my last post about soap, here are the two soaps I made then, cut in bars by now: 

A coconut castille soap - it looks so clean! Hoping this will be a good one for the kids' showers.

This is version 2.0 of the citrus scented cook's bar 'Lemony Lather' - the bits of dehydrated lemon peel turned reddish, so it has a funny speckled look. It smells amazing of a combination of lemon grass, lemon balm, lemon, and citronella.

Sunshine and Roses! I'm so hooked on soap making. This is going to be one clean family :-)

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.