Soap making - part 1 - Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

Today is a holiday at work and the first day of my 10 straight days off work! While the guys were hear finishing up the tile installation (prev post), I made a batch of soap. I'm not going to give you every detail, just the basic steps. Soap making is much more involved than lotion making - there's some science involved - but once you understand it, it's quite easy. If you decide that you want to make soap, I recommend reading The Soapmaker's Companion before jumping in.

Start with the materials and ingredients. Anything that you use for soap making needs to be kept and used for soap making only. I keep everything in a separate cabinet. Soap has three main ingredients: distilled water, lye and fats.
You need a scale, a mixer or blender ( soap makers actually recommend a stick blender), a soap mold (I have one that is made to be a soap mold but that white plastic tray makes a good one too. The big bowl is for measuring the fats and mixing the soap. The second photo shows the lye supplies. I keep all of these completely separate. I have two thermometers, one for fats and one for lye.

Next is the recipe. Majestic Mountain Sage is where I buy all of my supplies and they have a online lye calculator. I use the lye calculator a lot because I frequently make "leftover" batches. Calculating the lye is really important. I didn't do it once and got bad results! Today I didn't have all of the ingredients for my two favorite recipes so I made a new one from what I had on hand. I'm not sharing today's recipe because it might be a dud! Here are my two favorite recipes:

Jojoba Mango Bar
8 ounces Coconut Oil
4 Jojoba Oil
2 ounces Mango Butter
5 ounces Olive Oil (always use the cheapest/lightest olive oil, not the EVOO)
12 ounces Palm Oil
1 ounce Beeswax
10 ounces distilled water
4.15 ounces lye

Shea Butter Bar
9.6 ounces Olive Oil
6.4 ounces Shea Butter
9.6 ounces Coconut Oil
6.4 ounces Palm Oil
12 ounces water
4.4 ounces lye

Step 1:
Measure all of the ingredients. The fats are measured into the big bowl. Set this aside until the lye and water are mixed.

Put the distilled water into the pyrex container and the lye in a small plastic container. Take these items outside with the dedicated lye spoon and thermometer. I wear a mask, rubber gloves and eye protection when working with the lye. This stuff burns like crazy on your skin.

Step 2:

Mix the lye into the water. The water turns white at first, it smells really strong and it gets very HOT so be careful. Keep stirring until the water is clear.

Once mixed, the water temperature will be about 160 degrees. On a heavy pollen day like today, I cover the Pyrex container with a plastic bowl to keep the pollen out. Leave this to cool.

Step 3:

Melt the fats. I use the microwave and try 3 minutes first and then add a minute until everything is melted. When beeswax is an ingredient it takes about 5 minutes to melt everything. Put the fats thermometer in the bowl. Today's batch was 140 degrees out of the microwave. Let the fats and lye cool until they are both around 110 degrees. If you are not using beeswax you can cool to a lower temperature.

Step 4:

Prepare the mold. I am using a purchased soap mold but almost any container works fine. I line the mold with a plastic grocery bag and use the acrylic liner panels to hold the plastic in place. I trim it all up and use scotch tape to hold everything in place. The mold needs a cover. I use a piece of cardboard covered in plastic wrap.

In the second photo you can see the fancy cardboard cover. The white pan underneath is a drawer organizer that I also use as a mold. I line it with wax paper of freezer paper (shiny side out). Unless you are really particular about your bar shape, you do not need to buy a custom mold.

Step 5:

Mix the lye into the fats. Once the optimal temperature is reached (15 - 30 minutes), put the bowl of fats in the sink. Slowly add the lye while blending.

This is a critical step. You must thoroughly blend the lye into the fat or you will have lye streaks in the soap bars and they will not be usable. The books all refer to the mix "tracing" as being the right time to stop. I've yet to figure out what "trace" means so I mix until it's very creamy and thickens some. Usually this is a few minutes.

Step 6:

Pour the soap mixture in the mold. In this photo you see a small box to the right. My soap mix is a few ounces to large for the one mold so I pour the remaining in this wax paper-lined box.