Buying a Soap-Making Kit

We have lye and have rendered our own tallow and have our own goat milk and dried herbs and everything else we need to make homemade soap, but sometimes when we start something new, I need to get kick-started with something easy to give me the confidence.  I saw that they had a soap making bundle at Cultures For Health.  I purchased the bundle that makes Rosemary-Peppermint soap.  That seemed like an interesting combination.

The bundle, pictured below, contained instructions, a soap mold, glycerine soap base, rosemary essential oil, and organic dried peppermint.  No, the box of Popeye's chicken was not an ingredient in the soap.  So let's make some soap.  I'll give a short review at the bottom.

Cultures for Health Soap Making Bundle

The first thing you do is cut up the glycerine soap base into one-inch squares.  This helps the soap base to melt quickly.  The glycerine is soft and cuts easily.  Benjamin helped to cut up the glycerine.

Cutting up soap

In a double boiler (two pots nested together with water in the bottom one), we melted the glycerine soap base.  In no time at all it melted into a smooth consistency.

We dropped 40 drops of Rosemary essential oil into the melted glycerine soap base and stirred.

Then we added two tablespoons of dried peppermint and stirred.

Once it was all mixed up, it was pretty much done.  This almost looks like an alfredo sauce  or something that you would pour over some linguine or bowtie pasta. but trust me, you wouldn't want to do that!

Tricia carefully poured the soap into the soap molds and was able to do so without spilling it.

The recipe actually made a little bit more that the four molds contained in the kit. Fortunately we had some extras that I had purchased at Hobby Lobby and so we poured the excess into that mold, yielding 5 bars of homemade Rosemary-Peppermint Soap.

The soap dried quickly (~2 hours) and it didn't take much effort to pop the soap out of the mold.  The soap smelled great!  It looked great, too.

In summary, the soap making bundle was EASY.  I mean it was so very easy a child could do this. This would be a good project for a family with young children to do or perhaps a grandma & grandpa with the grandkids.  It would be a good craft project for a Mother's Day gift.  If someone said a dirty word and required "getting their mouth washed out with soap," I figure that Rosemary-Peppermint soap would be better tasting than Ivory!

We like doing business with Cultures for Health, but I found that from an economical standpoint, the soap-making bundle was a little pricey.  The total cost before shipping was $30.99 or $6.20 per bar. That is just a little too much for my liking.  To be fair, however, we still have most of the bottle of Rosemary Essential Oil and most of the bag of dried organic peppermint.  The peppermint will come in handy for making tea this winter.  Not to mention the fact that the soap molds are re-usable. Considering that, you could probably knock a buck or a buck fifty maybe off the unit cost.

We had a good time making the soap.  It smells great and we can't wait to use it. Probably the best part about it is that we now have the confidence and are now motivated to make our own soap. Standby - hopefully in the next few weeks we'll embark upon mixing lye and tallow to make some old-fashioned lye soap.