Soap Making. Making Soap.

So, ok.  We don’t actually make the soap.  We buy the soap from another soap maker (because we don’t really live in a good place where soap making with the lye and all the chemicals would be easy and safe to clean up, and I’m not really sure our renter’s insurance covers soap-making-mess-ups).  But we do mix scents and melt the base and add in the best of the earth’s essential oils, plant extracts, herbs, and dried flowers and create beautiful, yummy-smelling soaps.

Here’s what we did today… it’s a long affair of melting, mixing, pouring, and waiting, so we only started out with one batch.  We’ll do more as the week goes on.  Today we did a rosemary mint batch, and the house is smelling awesome.

First, we put together all of our tools:

From left to right: goat’s milk, glycerine, and shea butter soap bases, various molds, soap cutter, herbs, and essential oils and plant extracts.

Then we cut the soap base and melt it down to a liquid.  We use the microwave, because it’s faster and we’re impatient.  But you can also use a double boiler on your stove or a commercial melter.  The liquid soap is very hot when it first comes out, but cools quickly so we move fast to add the scents.  Here I’m adding a concoction of peppermint oil and rosemary oleoresin extract (it’s green and sticky and smells like rosemary… duh!).

Then we stir stir stir and pour really carefully into molds.  These ones will be bars, but we made a few rounds too.  We also ordered a brand-new awesome loaf mold that hasn’t come in yet, but will be really fun to use–you pour the whole lot into it and let it set 24 hours, then cut it up into slices like a loaf of bread.  That’s new for us this year, and I’m very excited to try it out.

The color on the screen is kind of a weird yellow, but the true hue of these soaps is a beautiful earthy green.  At this point the soap is already starting to set up, and can get a little globby, so we had to re-heat to keep it from getting funky.

Then we stamped them with LPE…I made the stamp out of resin block, and it broke down from all of the stamping and heavy pressing 😦 so I’m going to have to find an alternative method of pressing L.P.E. into the soap face (suggestions greatly appreciated!!).

Anyhoo, here’s the finished product!

Again, the color is a weird yellow here, but in REAL LIFE, they’re a lovely shade of pale earthy green… I hope the color doesn’t turn people off, but oh well.  THEY SMELL FABULOUS, and they’re really creamy and lather up nicely.  Hopefully I’ll be able to do another style tomorrow…