Soap-making questions – can you help?

Posted by louisa on Monday 30 January 2012 in soap | 10 comments

Two people have asked me soap-making questions on Twitter this afternoon and I thought I’d post them over here as well because I know that not everyone is a Twit.

Firstly, Clare of Three Beautiful Things asked:

Do you have any soap cutting tips, please? I’ve just bought a large block and don’t want it to crumble when I slice it.

I couldn’t help with this one – my soap is still a little soft when I cut it so crumbling isn’t an issue. When my first batch was a bit harder, it did crumble a bit under the knife but I just accepted the rough edged soap bars and collected the crumbles for use as laundry/household soap. Any advice to avoid the crumbles in the first place though?

@AlisonJFews replied:

Don’t know about cutting it, but need a really good soap supplies website. With the one I chose, you had to spend £25 + a time!

And again, I couldn’t help! The soap I’ve made has always been from supermarket supplies and I’ve used misc things as moulds so I’ve not had to use any soap making supplies websites for specialist oils, fats or what-have-you.

For people like me who like to use what’s easily on hand, Sharon of SmithyCraft sent us this link for working out how much lye to use – thanks Sharon.

Has anyone else got any advice/ideas for the other questions?

(By the way, this has reminded me that I’ve been sent a soapmaking ebook to read and review – I’ll get that done this week!)

Using our homemade olive oil soap

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 12 April 2011 in making, soap | 9 comments

Last week, we started using our homemade olive oil soap.

You might remember I spent A MILLION HOURS waiting for the damn thing to trace back in February but didn’t think it would work because it was sloppy in the moulds for a few days. Then it started to solidify and I did a happy dance.

So, anyway, after a few more weeks of curing/drying, we started using it last week. I went with one of the 100% olive oil ones, not the one-third olive oil, two-thirds other veg oils (more on those later when we try them).

I was really paranoid at first – worried it would be too caustic or something – so made sure to scrap off the bits of white powder (soda ash) from the edges, rather than just washing it off. Cavitch’s troubleshooting guide says to beware of “excessive” white powder as that can indicate too much lye or hard water has been used – but I don’t think my white powder was “excessive”, just some.

The soap is very pale – almost pure white. Apparently the better quality of olive oil, the paler the resulting soap. My olive oil (which came from Netto) claimed to be extra virgin so this fits. It has quite a neutral smell – slightly olive oil-ish but nowhere near as strong as the olive oil I started with. It’s pretty hard now and doesn’t lather much at all – but that’s expected with pure olive oil soap and the latter isn’t a huge problem as it’s not like we’ll be using it as shaving soap or anything like that.

So anyway, the verdict. It feels nice to use – smooth and silky, and no alkaline burns at all – always a good thing in a soap ;). Because of the play and stuff last week, I haven’t actually got my hands that dirty since we started using the soap so can’t comment on the actual cleaning properties but it leaves my skin feeling clean – and … not “squeaky”. I don’t know how to describe it but whenever I usually use normal bar soap, my skin feels “squeaky” afterwards – presumably either dryness or some sort of residue. That isn’t a problem with our olive oil soap – even when I washed them five times in a row to double-triple-quintiple check that it wasn’t too caustic (yes, really overly paranoid).

As I said explained in my last soap post, we’re not interested in pretty or pleasantly perfumed soaps – we want them to clean us, be long lasting, to have an inoffensive smell, create minimal waste and be frugal. The hardness of this soap means it doesn’t turn to mush in the soap dish and the only waste produced were two plastic bottles (which can be recycled – but one of which was actually reused as a soap mould first).

As for the frugalness, I had used this recipe and method which called for 1 litre of olive oil, 126g of caustic soda and 300g of water. I paid £2.52 for the olive oil from Netto, about £1.50 (I’ve lost the receipt!) for 500g of caustic soda from Wilkinsons (so about 38p for the amount I used) and tap water (which is effectively free), so the consumables cost around £2.90 for the batch. (I did buy a pan and steel dish to use too – but they’ll be used again for soap making and other non-foody pursuits (such as dyeing) so I considered them a general craft supply costs rather than including them in these figures.)

Weighing it just now, I’ve got around 1050g of dried, ready-to-use soap – or 35p per 125g bar — my bars differ in sizes (from about 50g, for the ones from the fruit tray mould – as seen in the pictures – to about 125g for ones shaped in an old mini roaster tray) but that’s the size of a bar of Oliva soap, which is the 100% olive oil soap we’d used previously, so is a good comparison. Oliva usually costs about £1 a bar.

All in all, I’m glad I tried it and I’m very happy with the result – but it was a bit of a faff. I think I did the right thing by processing two loads of soap on the same day so made economies of scale re: faffiness. Hopefully the soap we’ve got now will last us about a year – I’d happily do it once every six months or a year but I couldn’t be bothered doing it much more frequently than that.

Soap making book reviews: Soapmaking by Sarah Ade and The Natural Soap Book by Susan Miller Cavitch

Posted by louisa on Monday 7 March 2011 in making, soap | 1 comment

Ahead of making soap for the first time a fortnight ago, I bought and read two soap making books – I thought it would be best to get familiar with the techniques before I started playing with burn-your-flesh lye.

The books I bought were:

• ‘Soapmaking’ by Sarah Ade, part of the New Holland Self-Sufficiency series, and,
• ‘The Natural Soap Book: Making Herbal and Vegetable-based Soaps’ by Susan Miller Cavitch

Both came with glowing reviews on Amazon but, to be frank, neither book particularly did it for me. I spent a lot of time looking for what I thought would be the most suitable books but still, I may have had overly high expectations or completely wrong ones so I’ll start with some positives of both before I start with my criticisms.

Both are nice books to look at and easy to read. ‘The Natural Soap Book’ is particularly lovely – it’s printed in a lovely purple font on soft cream paper, with clear, relevant line illustrations. There is a lot of text in it – considerably more than ‘Soapmaking’ – but there is still enough “whitespace” to make it pleasant to read and not feel cluttered or dense.

Both books include pages on soap-making history & theory, useful information on the chemistry of soap making (saponification charts etc) and the characteristics of different oils/butters, and scents and other (natural) addictives. ‘The Natural Soap Book’ went a bit further, as you may expect from a more advanced book, but ‘Soapmaking’ provided a decent amount of information too.

But (and this is where the criticisms start) for all their talk about different soaps and oils/butters, the recipes seem lacking in variety. All but one recipe in each book contains olive oil, palm oil and coconut oil – not just in there a little bit, but the majority (fat) ingredients in every case. Now I know the authors are both experienced soap makers and I’m not so perhaps I’m wanting something that’s stupid, but I’d have liked different types of soap mentioned – a 100% olive oil recipe (since that was one of reasons I started looking at making soap), or some without palm oil or without coconut oil, or heck, without olive oil. It felt like there was a basic recipe that they always used (admittedly perhaps with good reason) and the only different thing was the essential oils or the odd bit of some special oil (‘Soapmaking’ was particularly guilty of this – they felt very much variations on a theme except for the liquid soap recipe in the “taking soap further” section).

Ten things to do while waiting forever for soap to trace

Posted by louisa on Friday 25 February 2011 in frugal, making, soap | 6 comments

1. Stare blankly out of the window (I did this a lot).

2. Gyrate your hips at the same speed/direction as the whisk for a lower back workout. (Warning: if you do this for a few minutes, it feels really weird when you stop .)

3. Wonder if that itch on your cheek is just an itch or a splash of caustic soap which will burn your entire face off. Itch or disfiguring splash? ITCH OR DISFIGURING FACE BURNING SPLASH?!! Oh, itch.

4. Look up “mixture not tracing” in the troubleshooting section of your soap making book and in a spate of paranoia, decide it’s all those problems together, even the ones that directly contradict each other and also worry that even though the itch on your cheek has stopped, perhaps it’s slowly melting YOUR ENTIRE SKULL.

5. Grow concerned for your mental state.

6. Have a cup of tea to calm down.

7. Think it’s finally tracing because it’s getting harder to stir, then realise no, it’s not tracing, it’s just your arm is getting really, really tired.

8. Wonder if it’ll ever trace. Ever, ever, ever.

9. Decide this is boring and a ballache and should never be attempted again.

10. Decide that once it’s reached trace and is poured into molds to take the dog for a walk and while you’re out go to Netto to buy more oil so you can started another batch this afternoon (I like grinding new skills – ie trying them multiple times in quick succession).

It’s been a long day.

Things from yesterday and today

Posted by louisa on Tuesday 8 February 2011 in growing, meta | 3 comments

I started my potatoes chitting yesterday. Well, they’d already started chitting all by themselves but I took them out of their nets and put them in egg boxes. Now to remember which is which…

Today is the first time in about a week when it’s not been blowing a gale so I’m tempted to spend the afternoon away from my computer and sow some seeds. Weee!

I collected six eggs this morning – we usually get five max. Being realistic, I think it was probably just a late one from yesterday and today’s five – but one was a little small, so maybe Lime’s coming out of moult.

(Buff has yet to provide us with a single egg (she’ll lay white ones, the rest lay light to mid brown ones so it’ll be clear when she does get around to it) and is getting noisier. From what I’ve read, it’s not uncommon for Leghorns to be late starters, and I guess winter will exacerbate that, but I’m worried she thinks she is a boy – or actually is a boy. Nothing obvious yet but *paranoia*.)

Our meal planning made it to Day Two before failing completely. Yay us. There is a reason though – we had both completely forgotten that John’s attending a talk in Manchester tonight so not only will be out for dinner but will need more substance at lunchtime than soup will provide (he’s unlikely to be eating dinner until after 9pm). And also half his company came for lunch today either en route to the talk or just because there was mention of fish and chips and everyone loves fish and chips. I will probably still end up making the sausage & lentil casserole because the sausages will go off otherwise, but I’ll freeze tonight’s portion instead.

I made the spicy butternut squash soup before we realised the change of plans so I’ll have that for dinner tonight. I made approximately 3litres of it. I might freeze some of that too ;)

A book on vegetable-oil soap making that I’d been umming and aahing about buying for ages arrived this morning – can’t wait to give that a go.

Some embroidery fabric (bought on eBay) also arrived so I can start on my next big stitchery project. Going to wait until I’ve finished the blanket (which is now wide enough to keep me warm while I’m crocheting it :) ) rather than get distracted but I’m working on my pattern. It’s going to be an evolving piece actually – it’ll never be finished-finished – which makes planning interesting!

We shaved & bathed the dog last night. (Not a euphemism.) She feels like silky velvet at the moment and while it’s not a perfect job, it’s certainly passable. It would have cost us at least £45 if we’d paid someone else to do it. She slept through all the clipping and got an egg afterwards for being a good girl.

There has been a few clumps of small brown mushrooms growing on the garden steps (covered with wood chippings) recently and I picked one to identify yesterday. It looks very much like a Deceiver (Laccaria Laccata) but it seems far too late in the year/early in the next one to be those. I will keep looking through my books to see what else it might be but any other suggestions would be gratefully received :)

What have you guys been up to?