Our First Attempt at Making Soap

We've wanted to make soap for the longest time.  One time I actually started making lye from firewood ashes and it was almost done, but the dog knocked over the lye and spilled it.  The soap-making project went on hold for several years.  However, we began accumulating everything you need over the years.  We had soap molds and lye.  We had plenty of tallow that we rendered when we butchered calves.  We had coconut oil and olive oil.  We have two goats in milk, so we have all the milk we need.  A couple of weeks ago, Tricia went to the store and bought measuring cups, spoons, and an immersion blender that will be dedicated to soap-making and we set this weekend to get things started.

First we froze the goat milk in ice cube trays.  For this recipe we'll use 4 ounces.

It is very important when handling lye that you use safety glasses and gloves.  She measured out 1/4 of a cup + 2 Tablespoons of lye.

Tricia poured the lye into 4 ounces of distilled water.

She stirred it up real good so that the lye crystals dissolve.  On the far left of this photograph, you'll see a quart-sized mason jar that contains the fat we're using to make the soap.  It is being warmed, so it is in a liquid state.  It is a total of 3 cups of fat (oil), which was 1 1/2 cups beef tallow (11 ounces), 3/4 cup coconut oil (5 1/2 ounces), and 3/4 cups olive oil (5 1/2 ounces). 

A chemical reaction occurs that is pretty intense.  The lye heats up the water.  It got above 200 degrees Fahrenheit for a bit.

When the temperature cooled to 90 degrees, we poured 4 ounces of the frozen goat milk into the lye/distilled water solution, bringing the total liquid to 8 ounces.  If you don't wait for it to cool, it will burn the milk and turn it brown.

Then, putting the immersion blender into the cooled lye solution jar, you slowly pour the warmed fat (oil) in while blending.

The consistency of the soap will be like that of pudding, where it holds its shape a bit.  We used a spatula to spoon it out into a soap mold that we coated with Vaseline petroleum jelly.

If we learned anything that we could do differently, next time we'll try adding a little bit more liquid as the soap was a little too thick (1/4 to 1/2 cups more liquid).

Using the spatula, we smoothed out the soap in the mold.  We'll show you in a minute why we want to add a little more liquid.

We covered with plastic wrap and you could feel the soap heat back up.  We let it sit for 48 hours.

After 48 hours, we removed from the mold.  You can see that the soap block has imperfections.  It is not pretty, but it will have to do for our first attempt.  We're thinking that if the soap used more liquid, it would flow better and fill in the voids.  Tricia marked off 1 inch increments in the 10 inch block of soap.

I first tried to cut it with dental floss, but quickly realized that it was easier and more precise to just use a knife.

At last we have 10 bars of homemade goat milk soap. 

We'll put these away for 4 to 6 weeks, turning them from time to time and allow them to cure.  Then we'll use our homemade bars of soap!  Now that we've proven to ourselves that we can do this, we're going to try to make a soap recipe using goat milk, oatmeal, honey and aloe.

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.

Making Lye (Part 2)

Here we are four days later since our first post here in: Making Lye (Part 1) and it is time to check on our lye water that has been soaking (leaching) in our fireplace ashes. The rainwater we poured on top of the ashes has been soaking for about four days and it is time to drain it out and test it to determine if it is strong enough for soap making.  I cut the bottom out of a gallon sized vinegar jug in order to make a funnel. Then I cut an old T-shirt up and placed it inside the homemade funnel to use as a filter. Then I pulled the plug.

Pullin' the plug

I prepared myself for a rush of water mixed with ashes, but I was wrong.  Only a drip, drip, drip of tea-colored lye water emerged and I realized that this was going to be a multi-day affair. The lye water was filtering through the ashes making the progress slow, but in the process making the liquid almost clear.

Drip, drip, drip...

Since I couldn't hold the funnel for days, I did the next best thing.  I put the T-shirt filter over the clean bucket, tilted the top molasses bucket full of ashes and rainwater at an angle to speed up the dripping and just left it there for a few days to completely drip out.  The T-shirt filter caught the minimal amount of ashes that drained through the plug.

Lye dripping out slowly (Patience is a virtue!)

Since we have friends and neighbors coming to get milk and eggs, we wanted to be sure that no one touched the liquid since it is caustic and will burn you.  Tricia made a warning sign to let them know to be careful around it.  I need to correct the sign to read that it is caustic.  Lye is alkaline, the opposite of acidic, and is caustic, meaning it will cause chemical burns.

I ain't gonna lye - this liquid will burn you!

Finally the bucket stopped dripping.  The result was a somewhat clear liquid, about the color of iced tea, and you could see the bottom of the bucket.  I didn't measure it, but I assume that we yielded a little more than a couple gallons of lye water.

Lye water

I learned by checking several places on the Internet that for regular soap making (which is our goal), the way you test the strength of the lye is by putting a potato or an egg in the lye.  If either one has a quarter-sized area to float above the liquid level, the strength is perfect for soap making.  Lye gets stronger each time you leach it.  As you can see the potato floated, but NOT above the level of the liquid.  That tells us that it is not quite ready yet.  It needs to get stronger so we'll soak it again.  We want to be sure and throw this potato away!!

Potato floating in the lye - Not quite strong enough yet.

So I put the rubber plug back into the big bucket of ashes and poured the lye water back into it.  We'll let it leach for another 3 or 4 days, drain it again and then check the strength again with another potato or egg.

Same song, second verse

The clear lye water quickly became "muddy" again when mixed with the ashes.  One side note:  I wore gloves handling the lye water, but when the test showed it wasn't strong enough, I took them off and picked up the T-shirt wet with lye with my bare hands.  I could instantly feel the burn on my fingers!  I will be more careful next time.  I'm okay, but it taught me to not let my guard down.  It is not called CAUSTIC by mistake.

Check back with us next week where we'll post Part 3 in our Lye Making Experiment where we'll test the strength of the lye again.