I told you the day was almost here. In my never ending quest to rid the house of stuff in anticipation of someday being able to sell the place, part of my mission is to use up or throw out whatever I can. This includes boxes and containers filled with lotion and soap making supplies. First we did the lotion. Now we move on to soap making. I know you were all anxiously awaiting this day!
Making soap is a bit more complicated. This isn’t any old melt & pour operation. Nope, we go the whole way with using oils and lye. Now I know back in the day, when women used to do this all the time, they used animal fat. While I have no objections to eating meat (unless you want me to cook rabbit), the idea of washing yourself with animal fat sorta grosses me out. (I know this is illogial but hey, I can’t be logical 100% of the time.) Therefore, the only stuff I use is vegetable based: coconut oil, palm oil, cocoa butter, shea butter, stuff like that. All of this gets measured and melted.

While that’s sitting on the stove, out comes the distilled water and the lye. I keep the water in the refrigerator and even with cold water, the lye solution heats up to over 140 degrees.

Doing the lye is the fun part because you have to be real careful not to breathe in the fumes or splash it on yourself. Otherwise you’ll end up searing your lungs or needing to wear a mask like The Phantom.
Then you wait until both the oils and the lye mixture are around 120 degrees. You pour the lye into the fats and beat it with one of those stick blenders until it looks like pudding. Sure it looks good but trust me, you don’t want to taste this stuff. Not if you ever plan on tasting anything else ever again.
Then you pour it into the molds and cover it with plastic wrap. In addition to the plastic wrap, it gets covered with a blanket so that it can stay warm and continue to turn into soap but if I took the photo with the blanket, you wouldn’t be able to see anything.

Being obsessive, I like to do a little ph test. The initial tests always show a very high ph. This one is about a 10.

That means if you try to wash yourself with this stuff, it will not only get the dirt off but it will take a layer or 2 of your skin off, as well. A couple of days later, the soap comes out of the molds.

This time, the ph has dropped way down. It’s about an 8 here. Neutral is 7 and it’ll test at that within a week. You could probably use it at that point but I usually cure it for at least a month. The longer it’s cured, the harder the bars are.

Next week we’re going to have a new contest here. I think I may decide to award a bar of homemade soap as the prize. I know it’s not much of a prize but it’ll last longer than just 15 minutes of fame.
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posted at 7:57 am