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.

Competing "Farmers" in my Patch of Cowpeas

I have several varieties of cowpeas that are maturing right now, including, Black-eyed peas, Purple Hull peas, Ozark Razorback peas, and Holstein peas.  As soon as they began to bloom and put on little pods, I noticed a couple of things.  First the pods and stems were covered with little bugs.  A closer look showed that they were aphids.  But, they weren't the only insects on the cowpeas.  There were ants running up and down the plants.

Aphids on my cowpeas

According to This Interesting Article the aphids are actually being herded like farmers and ranchers herd cows.  Ants are the farmers in this instance.  Instead of using a 'hot shot' like farmers and ranchers use to provide an electric shock to cows to keep them in line, ants use chemicals on their feet to tranquilize the aphids so that they stay close.  The reason the ants want their herd of aphids close is that the aphids provide something that the ants want.  The aphids eat the plant and then secrete a sugary excretion called 'honeydew' that the ants eat.

A heard of aphids on the ants' "pasture"

You can see a couple of ants on top of the cowpea leaf checking the herd and then having maybe having a snack of some sticky-sweet honeydew.

The competing farmer in the cowpea patch

So all that sounds fine and good, I guess, but not for me.  The aphids make a sticky mess on the pods and when you try to pick them, the ants bite you.  I have to do something to get rid of both the aphids and the ants and wanted to try natural means to do so.  I mixed up some Dawn Dishwashing liquid with some water in my garden sprayer and sprayed the leaves of the cowpeas real good with the sudsy concoction.  The soap is supposed to remove a waxy protective covering on the insects causing dehydration and death.  Those that don't die, will leave.  

Spraying a soapy solution on the peas

I coated the leaves with a heavy coating in hopes of making the farmers and their herd of aphids either die or leave for greener pastures.

Did it Work?

So did the soapy water experiment work?

The day after my application, I was real encouraged.  The cowpeas were completely clean!  The aphids and ants were nowhere in sight.  Unfortunately, two days later, they were back with a vengeance, covering the plants even more than previously.  I quickly picked the ripened pods and threw them in a bucket of water to wash the aphids and ants off.  For next year's crop of cowpeas, I'll make sure that I have Neem Oil on hand.  I don't have any right now, but I have since read that Neem oil is a good natural way to control aphids and ants on cowpeas.  

If at first you don't succeed, try try again.  The garden is only big enough for one of us, and I'm not leaving.  Many times I have enough trouble getting a crop in.  I certainly don't need competing farmers in my garden.

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.  

The Next Project Waiting in the Wings

After a colder than normal winter in which we burned a whole lot of firewood, I cleaned out the fireplace. This is a job that I put off because it takes a while to do. First you scoop the ashes out and put them in a bucket, then you remove the andirons and sweep the remaining ashes in a pile and scoop them out.  Ashes fly all over the place no matter how careful you are and a fine layer of ashes coats everything in the den.

Our fireplace was full and when I finished with the task, I had almost filled up the 30 gallon container shown below.  This container is one that was originally filled with molasses and minerals for the cows, but I now use it to catch rainwater from the drip line along the roof in the back, for putting hay in to carry to the hens' nesting boxes, for putting pecans in, and also for tasks like this.

A whole lot of ashes

These are all hardwood ashes, mostly water oak and pecan and that is a good thing because my project requires hardwood ashes.  The project I'm speaking of is making lye.

Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust...

I ain't gonna lye (pardon the play on words), we've never done this before, but there's a first time for everything.  Our goal is to make lye from our fireplace ashes and then make our own lye soap.  Now that I've gotten the raw ingredient for making lye, the work is mostly done.

Who knew that soap started from ashes?

All I need to do now is transfer this into a different container, run rainwater over the ashes, let it sit for a few days, and drain the water out and run it through again.  The result will be a liquid called caustic potash or potassium hydroxide, also known as lye and it will be the base for making lye soap.  We'll show you step by step how we do it as we have time to get this project going.