Staycation soap making

I've had a lovely day, made especially so by the visit of Foster Mummy and family and my apologies to them for being 'low' today...........I wasn't at my best; nonetheless it was wonderful to see them and to get the chance to try out some vegan cuisine on them of: chick pea and sesame burgers, butter bean pate, roast butternut squash, with roast sweet potato and courgette. Thanks so much to Man Wonderful for the wine! I'm drinking it as I blog.

On the soap making adventure. I've never made soap before but I knew the O level chemistry would come in handy one day! You start off by measuring sodium hydroxide and adding it to bottled water (the water can not have chlorine in it so tap water won't do apparently). You must add the NaOH to the water and stir. You have to wear goggles, an apron, long sleeves and thick rubber gloves. .........this will eat through flesh and bones.

Stir well in a well ventilated room. Do not fall over the bucket!!! In a pan, melt solid vegetable fat (or if you're minted........solid coconut oil) and then add the olive oil and sunflower oil. When melted, add to the solution of sodium hydroxide.

Then you stir for an hour!!! In the end it changes colour and textures and has the consistency of custard, when you dribble some on the surface it leaves a visible trail.

Below is the soap, mid way through stirring.................this is really boring but the Archers was on the radio, so that entertained me for a while.

Once it changes colour and texture to resemble custard, add the essential oil. I used half a bottle of lavender oil, I could have added more but it smelt so strong that I was cautious and only added half.

I poured the custard like solution into old lunch boxes, I then placed the lids on top. Do not over fill the containers as by all accounts the soap will expand.

Below is the finished soap, it has the usual creamy soap colour and now does not smell simply of olive oil, but predominantly of lavender.

Then the washing up.

Keep the gloves and goggles and other protection on whilst cleaning up, this is highly caustic at this stage and can burn. Make sure you get all the solution off spoons, buckets and anything else that you use. Now you have to wrap up the soap to keep it warm for 24 - 48 hours.



I used all of my spare towels to wrap it up and now I have to wait and see if I have anything that resembles soap when I peek tomorrow evening. Watch this space.

If anyone is interested the costs are as follows

Bottle of olive oil - £2.39

Bottle of sunflower oil - 89p

Quarter of pack of Sodium hydroxide - 59p

Pack and half of 'Trex' - £1.50

Half a bottle of lavender oil - 50p

Total - £5.87

If this works and I make 32 bars of natural vegetable soap - the cost per bar will be 18p per bar.

More tomorrow to see if this worked. If you want the full instructions of how to do this, then I used the instructions from How to make soap - from Channel 4 - from Kirsty's handmade Christmas - my hope is to give people handmade soap for gifts. Here is another set of instructions about soap making from downsizer