Making Soap

The past week, my mom and I got bit by the soap-making bug!  We made a batch together of the "Walmart Recipe" (goat milk, a pound of lye, lard, coconut oil, safflower oil) and added about an ounce of fragrance, which was maybe a quarter of the amount we should have used!  It made about 27 bars, and half the expense was the fragrance!  Following that, my mom made a double batch of a castille soap (olive oil base) using half goat's milk and half water.  Using goat's milk certainly does add a lot of time and trouble to the process! 

Normally, when you make soap, you add lye to water, then add that mixture to your fats/oils, and mix it up until it looks like pudding and then pour it into your mold.  With goat milk, if you pour the lye too fast, it will cook the milk and make it an ugly brown color.  So, when we made a quadruple batch on Saturday, it took a couple hours just to add the lye!  We started with freezing the milk we had measured out in gallon pickle jars.  Then, we filled our big cooler with two big bags of ice, and placed the pickle jars of milk in there.  As we added the lye, we were constantly checking the temperature, stirring, waiting, moving more ice in...  we didn't let the temperature get above 100 degrees.  When my mom made her soap with half water and half goat milk, she first added the lye to the water, let it cool, then added the milk.  It made a lighter colored soap and took a lot less time.  I think that may be the way to do it in the future!

After that, we added the lye/milk mixture to our oils, and I had been playing with the lye calculator on soapcalc.net to see if I could come up with a soap I liked better.  I changed the safflower oil for a blend of castor oil (for the lather it will create), grapeseed oil, and walnut oil.  We didn't add fragrance this time--I was in too much a hurry to wait to order something!  After stirring that for hours without getting a trace (trace is when it looks like pudding and if you drop some off the stirring spoon onto the top of the mixture, it will stay on top rather than sinking down in), David came to the rescue with his paint mixer bit and electric drill!  In smaller batches, people use immersion blenders or "stick blenders" as I've heard them called. 

We lined our bathroom drawers with freezer paper and poured the soap into them.  That was Saturday evening.  Sunday, when we came home from church, the soap was ready to take out of the drawers and cut.  I used a large drywall mudding knife to cut the soap into bars, and a vegetable peeler to bevel the edges.  About half way through my cutting, some folks came over with does in heat to be bred to our bucks, so David finished up the cutting for me.  It isn't easy to get a uniform bar that way, so I think that if we do this again in the future, we'll be building a different mold!  The bars are all quite clearly handmade.  I have lots of shavings from beveling the edges, and I may play with hand milling that into new bars of soap...  if I like it, I might shred up more of the soap to hand mill, but I'm not sure yet.

So, we have over a hundred bars of soap sitting on my roll top desk, just curing away!  They will be Christmas presents.  We gave away goat milk soap last year that I had purchased, and I hope this year's soap will not be too much of a disappointment in comparison!  Does all the time and effort I put into it make up for it not being as pretty or smelling as nice?  Next year, I will plan ahead better and order different oils to soap with, and fragrances and maybe colors to add.  Definitely a learning experience!