We got tired of spending over $1-a-bar for soap several weeks ago, so we started looking around for ways to make soap at home. Most soapmaking was either dangerous — “lye can cause an explosion” — or too time-consuming — “let the soap cure for 30-days.” So, we kept looking until we found the perfect solution. Our 3.5-ounce bars of soap now cost us only $0.65/each, take about 30-minutes to make, and do not put us in danger of being blown off the face of the earth. All good reasons to make your own soap. So, here it is in four easy steps:
Buy pure vegetable glycerin bars. We buy ours in 5-pound bars from Clearly Natural Soaps. They sell 1, 5, and 25 pound bars of pure vegetable glycerin made without any animal by-products. Very important if you do not want animals killed so you can be clean. This is called melt-and-pour soap.
Melt the glycerin in a double boiler. We melt about 1.5 lbs at a time, which creates roughly 6 “bars of soap.
Glycerin is really easy to cut and melt, so this is very simple.
Add essential oils, coloring, and whatever else you want. We keep it simple with essential oils like orange oil, lavendar, and eucalyptus (not all in the same batch), and yellow, purple, or green colors. We use food coloring, but there is a soap color you can purchase. Food coloring seems to work just fine, just don’t overdo it.
Pour and let sit overnight. We pour our soap into a silicone muffin “pan.” Because the silicone pan is flexible, extracting the bars
of soap is easy. But, you could use soap forms, muffin pans, or any other form that can withstand hot soap! After the soap sits overnight, we wrap it, and put it in the bathrooms for all to use and enjoy.
After several weeks of using glycerin soap, Debbie and I both believe our skin is in better shape — pores smaller, skin smoother and more moisturized — than with commercial soaps. And we were using Dove! Which I am sure is a very fine commercial soap, but ours is much better. Plus, it’s a lot cheaper, too.
That’s pretty cool. You get to pick your favorite scent and color. Gift idea too.
I’ve been lurkinghere a while, getting ideas, and this is one I really want to try. Just one thing, what is a ‘double boiler’? I expect they are available here but under a very different name.
And a completely unrelated question: after deciding we also want to be growing as much as we cam, and much searching we’ve been offered use of a small batch of someone’s garden for food growing. Trouble is it’s a bit late to grow some things. Where should we start?
Jimmy CC, yeah, it is fun and does have gift potential. Which reminds me…we gotta make some more soap. Thanks for stopping by Jimmy!
Andy, glad you’ve come out of the shadows and welcome! A double boiler is two pots — the bottom pot holds water which boils, heating the contents in the top pot. A double boiler is especially useful if you do not want ingredients directly exposed to the burner. With a double boiler, the heat transfer is more gradual, more evenly spread out, so less chance of burning or over-heating the ingredients in the top pan. Hope that helps. As to the gardening question — we just dug up a new veg garden today and will plant beans, potatoes, and greens (lettuce, spinach) when the weather gets a little cooler. Not sure what your weather in Germany is like, but look for hints under “late summer garden” or “fall gardening.” Good luck! -Chuck
Great post! We’ll be making goat milk soap here at the farm…hope you can join us sometime!
Jerry Nelson
http://www.journeyamerica.wordpress.com
http://www.koinoniapartners.org
I would like to try this.I think it will do for me also.
I congratulate you on trying to cut down on the price you pay for soap. I encourage you to try actually making soap from scratch. Lye is nothing to fear—respect, yes—but not fear. I have been making soap for over 10 years. My first effort was very timid. I mixed my lye water outdoors and suited up like a hazmat worker. Now I work in my kitchen and stir my soap with a paint mixer on an electric drill in a 5 gallon bucket. I am happy to say that in this region of Tennessee near Gatlinburg and Great Smoky Mountains National Park that my soap sells very well in health food stores, gift shops and candle stores.
I make my soap in 100 bar batches. That’s 25 pounds of soap. I use high quality oils including shea butter, coconut oil and cocoa butter among others. I also usually use oatmeal as well for a skin soothing bar. My ingredients for a batch cost about $20. That’s about 20 cents a bar for a 4 ounce bar. My friends, family and coworkers love the soaps I give them.
It is a very economical gift. Besides the cost of your supplies, there is time involved in cutting, trimming and wrapping the soaps, but you are already accustomed to that. There is a difference in wrapping cold process soap and melt and pour. Melt and pour needs to be in plastic, while cold process needs to be in paper. There are a gazillion recipes out there and, of course, you can learn to make your own recipes after you learn what different ingredients do in soap.
I highly encourage you to visit Kathy Miller’s Homemade Soap Pages: http://www.millersoap.com/index.html#Soap%20Contents She has lots of good information there. You can not buy lye in a hardware store anymore (at least not around here) because it in one of the ingredients in crystal meth and the stores don’t want to feed that market. You can, however, buy it online. I get mine from missashtynssupplies.
I beg you to visit Kathy Miller’s site. She will show you some beautiful real handmade soaps!
Hi my name is mirla, Iv’e been making soap with lye and I had no idea that I could used glicerine, please tell me that glicerine is a replacement for the lye.
Thank you for the information.
This is quite a up-to-date information. I think I’ll share it on Delicious.