Make Soap

Last fall I attended a one evening soap making class. All participants walked away with one pound of homemade soap. The biggest hurdle overcome in that class was the lye handling. We didn't mix the lye ourselves in the class, but we did observe it, then used premixed lye solution to make our soap. It's one of those things that seems like mad scientist or voodoo witch doctor practices, but it wasn't as scary as I thought. Even so, I was glad to do the process at home with A who is well practiced in the art of chemistry.

We started planning our "flavors" of soap we wanted to create and started to gather our materials. we were both interested in using items from the tundra, but A scored big when she brought back a big bushy chunk of tundra that looked just like a black loofah. We shall make scrubby soap! She had also gathered some fireweed for indoor decoration and we made use of that as well.

I have to highly recommend Brambleberry.com as a great resource for soap making. There is a great lye calculator that creates a recipe and calculates the exact amount of lye needed. Based on our ingredients that we had handy, we ended up with three slightly different batches that consisted of olive oil pomace, olive oil, coconut oil, and palm kernel oil. We used tea tree and violet oil for two batches, and blended orange zest and aloe into the third.

They are sitting on a shelf in my kitchen curing for the next few weeks, but when I washed the molds we had used, the water turned sudsy. That was a great sign!

Scrubby soap cut and curing.