Soap making

My first herbal soap was a hopeful bright green, colored with dried parsley I had stirred through the batter expecting a fresh meadow bar.

Making soap from used cooking oil takes two stages: clean the oil, then saponify it. You strain out the food bits, wash the oil in hot salt water so the

My first soap scale was a 12 dollar kitchen model that read in whole grams and shut itself off after two minutes. I did not think either flaw mattered

Making soap in a crock pot is the hot process method: you bring lye and oils to trace, then cook the batter covered on low for about an hour, stirring

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