Making Soap!

Several weeks ago, my friend Sarah invited me over to her house to make soap. I had done this before at Brina's and we had a lot of fun, but I thought I would never do this again - at least not on my own. The lye sort of scared me, and the slow process seemed a bit tedious for something you can pick up very easily at the store. Well, Sarah told me that her friend had taught her how to make it fairly quickly using an old blender... You heat the fats until melted, measure the lye and mix it with water until it completely dissolves, and then combine the ingredients in the blender in a couple of short spurts. (Make sure if you try this, that you use a lye calculator - having the right amount is important for the chemical reaction to work properly.) Then pour in your additives (scent, color if you like, calendula leaves, whatever...) and blend until you see "trace" - in other words it's starting to harden. Finally, you pour directly from the blender into the molds, and voila! You are done. (I also used Gladware plastic containers as molds and those worked great.) We made about 15 different batches altogether, all in one afternoon!

You still have to wait about 6 weeks for the soap to cure, but after 1 week you can remove them from the molds. Aren't they pretty? A couple of nights ago, I finally got to take them out of the cupboard under the stairs where they had been curing. I chopped the soap that I hadn't put in the pretty molds (removing the "Glad" logo, and any backs that turned out a bit lumpy) using my Pampered Chef Crinkle Cutter - this was so fun, I was tempted to run upstairs and chop up my Irish Spring too!

See those leftover bits in the top left corner? I got the idea from this blog to save those for making nice-smelling sachets to give as gifts or to enclose in boxes when I ship stuff to people. Unfortunately, there was one batch that didn't turn out quite right. It had erupted after pouring it into the mold (which a few of them had - it freaked me out, but Sarah said this is no big deal) but for some reason this one didn't cure properly either. It's too bad because it had a lovely lavender smell. [Correction: The day after I posted this, I realized that it wasn't the lavender soap that did this. I think the lavender smell just permeated my entire kitchen that night. It was actually the citrus soap that didn't cure properly. That's even better for making a salt scrub, I think... See below.] I tried to remelt it, and could not get it to melting temperature without burning. I tried molding it while it was warm and soft into a small shoebox and left it overnight to see if it would harden enough to cut but here's what happened:It became a crumbly mess. It still functions like soap (lathers well, smells nice, etc) but it's the consistency of cookie dough. Hmmm... My first instinct was to throw it away, but that seemed too wasteful. I'm thinking I might try adding some jojoba oil and some Epsom salt and call it a salt scrub or something. What do you think?

So anyway, I can see myself scouring the garage sales this summer for an old glass blender, an electric scale, a container to mix lye in, and cold-process soap molds. I really enjoyed making it this time, and knowing that we're now using soap made with natural ingredients. Last week I stopped by our local used book store looking for my book club's monthly selection.... I didn't find that one, but I did come home with Obama's first book, Dreams from My Father (I've already read Audacity of Hope and would highly recommend it to anyone who is even remotely interested in the 2008 election,) and I also found these:Anyone want to show me how to dip candles?