Making Lye (Step 1)

We wanted to try and make some lye soap.  We've never done it before and we wanted to endeavor to start from scratch.  I did a lot of research and studied how to make lye, so we're going to give it a try.  In order to make lye soap, you need lye.  Lye (Caustic Potash) is known as KOH or Potassium Hydroxide.  I didn't do very well in Chemistry in high school, but fortunately you don't have to be a chemist to make it. Actually, you can make lye from the ashes of hardwood like oak.  We burn oak logs in our fireplace and this past winter when I cleaned out the fireplace, I saved all of the ashes and put them into one of the 30 gallon mineral buckets that I normally use to collect rain water.

Normally, I sprinkle this all throughout the garden.  Wood ash contains about 25% of calcium carbonate and that is a prime component in agricultural lime.  Adding wood ash to a garden will increase the soil pH and is good for your garden if your soil is acidic.  The ashes almost filled the bucket and I had set the bucket of ashes aside since February of this year until I had some time between the Spring and Fall gardens.

Ashes from the fireplace

The ashes burned clean.  There aren't many lumps of unburned wood or other debris in there.

The first thing I did was I went and retrieved another black 30 gallon bucket that our bull was in the process of pushing around the pasture.  Before he destroyed it, I got it and turned it upside down to use as a base on which to set the other bucket full of ashes.  Then I went to the local hardware store and purchased a rubber 3/4 inch plug. I put a grinding attachment on my drill and approximately 3 inches from the bottom, I drilled a hole and then inserted the rubber plug to seal it.

Plugging the hole

Along the back of the house I use molasses/mineral buckets for capturing rain water that cascades off the roof.   In order to make lye, you need soft water.  Rain water is soft and perfect for this application.  The more pure your water is, the more potassium that you'll be able to leach out of your ashes.

One of our rain collection buckets after a 1 inch rain

I poured the rain water into the large bucket of ashes and it bubbled.  The 'smoke' coming off of it makes it appear that the ashes were hot, but they've been cooled off now for 6 months or so.  The garage smelled like a fireplace.

A bubbling cauldron

Finally the bubbling stopped and that let me know that the rainwater had completely saturated the ashes.

The waiting begins

We'll just have to be patient now and wait.  We're going to let the rain water soak in the ashes for three days and then we'll check on it.  There is a way to test the strength of your lye and I'll show you that in Step 2. Once our lye is concentrated enough, we'll use it to make soap.  I'll post the Making Lye (Step 2) next week to keep you posted.