Welcome back to the craft room and today’s Flashback Friday Soap and Tell post. If you joined me for the last Friday’s post, Flashback Friday Hard Lotion Bar, you will know this is another addition to the Christmas 2016 gift for the ladies in my family. Making handmade soap is so much easier than I originally thought it would be. It also made a wonderful addition to this handmade gift set for the ladies. Let me take you on a little trip down the handmade soap adventure.
Soap and Tell
Hello everyone! I hope your January is progressing nicely and the weather where you are isn’t so bad. Today I want to share and show another item I added to the ladies gifts this year. This is something I had been thinking about trying for years, but never went beyond the thinking stage; handmade soap.
There are different ways to make soap for yourself or your loved ones. You can purchase some melt and pour soap base, a simple and nice idea. Or you can make it from scratch with oils, butters, lye, and liquids. I didn’t want to do the melt and pour method because it seemed too expensive for what it was. However, when thinking about starting from scratch, the biggest hold up for me was working with the lye. After a lot of research, I decided that with proper precautions and a whole lot of common sense I would be fine.
When you talk about making soap from scratch, there are two ways to accomplish this, Cold Process and Hot Process. The traditional way that our grandparents and great grandparents used is referred to as Cold Process. This is a long but necessary procedure. All the ingredients are mix together, put into a mold and left to sit for a day to harden. Remove it from the mold, cut into bars and then they cure for 4 – 6 weeks. Not only will it cure, but it will also harden the bars. During this wait the soap goes through its chemical process of saponification and becomes soap.
Saponification is the process where oils or fats meet a strong base, like lye, and transform into soap, with glycerol as a helpful byproduct.
The new and some would say “faster” method is called Hot Process. In this process, you place the ingredients into a crock pot in a certain order. The mixture is then cooked through the saponification stage. The soap is then scooped into the molds and left to cool before removing and cutting into bars. You can use this soap as soon as you cut it. However, a general rule of thumb is to still let it sit for 2 to 4 weeks to harden. I found a website that suggests you weigh one of your bars of soap as soon as you cut it. You will then keep a record of the weight change or water loss of that one bar. When it stops “losing weight”, it’s ready to use.
I have used each method to make soap, but my personal preference (so far) is the hot process method. I haven’t completely ruled out trying another batch or two of cold process, but I think for general soap making it’s the crock pot for me.
That was the “tell” part of the post and now for the “show”!!!
Easy 6 Ingredient Soap
Here is my very first batch of hot process soap! Isn’t it pretty??? LOL This recipe uses Crisco, olive oil, lard, coconut oil, and a water lye solution. I used two Pringles cans as my mold for this soap, something that can only be done with hot process soap mixtures. As you can see below, I didn’t get it packed down completely so there are some holes in my bars. Not a big deal since this was a first time try and for our personal use.
Goat’s Milk Honey Soap
My next attempt was a goat’s milk honey soap. Because I had never made this recipe before, I didn’t understand how much this would make. Because of this, I made an error in splitting it into two molds, hence the short stack! The soap recipe includes olive oil, coconut oil, sunflower oil, shea butter, sweet almond oil, and a goat’s milk, water and lye solution. A tablespoon of honey is added at the end of the cook time. Because the lye mixture gets extremely hot, the goat’s milk is frozen beforehand. This will ensure the milk does not scorch and ruin the soap.
For the actual gifts I remade this same recipe in one mold to make a full size bar. I also added a piece of bubble wrap to give the illusion of the honeycomb. Pretty cool, but I didn’t take a picture of the finished bars! You can still get the idea of what that looked like and it was a cool idea so thank you to whoever first mentioned that on your soap blog!!!
Coffee Scrub Kitchen Soap
The third (and fourth) batch of soap was a coffee scrub kitchen soap. This only uses three different oils, coconut, olive and soybean oil (otherwise known as vegetable oil). The lye is mixed with a strong coffee and a teaspoon of coffee grounds are added for exfoliation. I decided to try this recipe using the cold and hot process and you can see the difference in the picture below.
The hot process is the darker bar, and the lighter one is cold process. The hot process bar looks rustic with the texture to the top. The cold process bar has a nice smother texture to it. The reason for the difference is all in the texture of the mixture when added to the molds. Cold prosses soap is poured into the mold, it is the consistency of pudding. Hot process, after cooking is the consistency of mashed potatoes. Because of this you sort of glop the mixture into the molds. I’ll do another post soon and show you what I mean by that.
This has been a fun process to learn and there is still so much left to learn! With the help of more experienced soapers out there, I hope to one day know enough to try and come up with my own recipe. Until then, I have tons of different recipes to choose from online!
Thank you for joining me for today’s Flashback Friday Soap and Tell post. I had so much fun making soap that I am still doing it to this day. I regularly make a batch of the Coffee Scrub soap to keep in the kitchen. Not only is it a wonderful exfoliating bar with the coffee grounds, but it has an even better advantage. With the addition of the coffee in the soap, it will remove any unwanted aroma from your hands. Hate that left over smell of onions after you wash your hands? Use this soap and that smell is GONE! It is a must have in my house!
Have you ever made your own soap? If you do, what recipe do you use? Let me know down in the comments. Until then, have a fantastic weekend, and I will see you back in the craft room again soon!
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