For my first two years of soap making I tracked everything in a spiral notebook and one free web calculator. It worked until the night before a three-batch
The trick to buying soap ingredients is to split your shopping by weight: get cheap, heavy base oils like coconut and olive at the grocery store or a local
My first soap labels were inkjet printouts on white sticker paper, and I was proud of them for about four days. By the first humid Saturday at market the
A soap scrub is a normal soap with an exfoliant stirred in at trace, about a tablespoon per pound of oils, chosen to match where it will be used.
The first recipe I built without a tutorial was 70 percent olive oil, because I thought more olive meant a gentler bar. It unmolded like cold pudding and
The cheapest good bar of soap comes from a small blend of budget oils: a hard lathering oil like coconut, a conditioning liquid oil like pomace olive
I sold my first tray of lavender bars at a Saturday market for 6 dollars each, about three years after I started stirring lye in my kitchen.
Making soap with soap flakes is the no-lye, kid-safe method: mix soap flakes, bought or grated from a pure bar, with a little warm water until they bind
My worst crumbling loaf came from thinking that if hard oils make a hard bar, more of them would make a better one. I have been making soap for about eleven
Soap on a rope is made by embedding a looped cord into a bar so it can hang and dry between uses. You tie the rope into a knotted loop, suspend it in the