Title: Making Soap Part 1
Categories: Crafts Herb
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Making Soap

In days of yesteryear making your own soap and candles was an event that usually involved the whole family. People would get together, sometimes whole neighborhoods, to produce a huge batch of soap and candleware. Today, both products are so inexpensive to buy that the art of making them has all but vanished. Yet, there is a special satisfaction to making your own.

Soap can be scented or unscented, as you choose. You can make everything from delicate face soaps to laundry soaps right in your kitchen. Since you control the ingredients, you will not need to worry about harmful chemical additives or the allergic reactions people with delicate complexions often get when using commercial soaps.

You can add emolients to soap for their desirable qualities. Such ingredients include cold cream, lanolin, cocoa butter or even powdered oatmeal. Add emolients in appropriate amounts, so as to not affect the soap-making process. Also, you should add most emolients after the soap has saponified while it is still cooling. Remember to always add fragrances as the very last ingredient.

You can also add special ingredients to soap, such as aloe vera, vitamin E, wheat germ oil, jojoba oil, vitamin A and D, and baking soda. Do not add cornstarch to soap. Cornstarch can leave a thin film on your skin that might attract bacteria. Do not put in your soap any ingredients that might be poisonous. Posins can be absorbed through the skin.

Some people like to add buttermilk (in liquid or powder form) to their homemade soaps; others like to add lemon juice. Coconut oil is a favorite ingredient for people who really like suds.

Do not add any ingredient that you are allergic to unless you do not plan to use the soap yourself.

INGREDIENTS

There are only three ingredients essential to making soap: grease (fat), lye and water. Other ingredients are added to give certain desired qualities to the soap.

Although soap making is fairly simple to do, it is critical that you follow instructions carefully. Lye is a caustic substance. If mishandled, it can burn skin or even cause blindness. Add lye only to cold water. Never add lye to hot water, because it might cause a violent chemical reaction.

Most commercial lye is either a caustic soda, such as sodium hydroxide, or a mineral salt known as potassium hydroxide. Hard soaps are made with sodium hydroxide or caustic soda: soft soaps are made with potassium hydroxide.

Lye is commercially available with instructions for its use on the can. You also can make your own lye water by soaking a bucket of wood ashes overnight. The water that you pour off in the morning will be lye water. This is the way colonials made their soap.

Use only wood ashes. Do not try to make lye water from coal or coke ashes. Coal ashes contain chemicals that might irritate or damage the skin.

Some people add salt to help curdle the soap, but it is not necessary. You can add baking soda, or sodium bicarbonate, to soap. It is an inexpensive ingredient that contributes desirable qualities, including deodorizing and cleansing.

Continued in Part 2 "Making Potpourri, Colognes and Soaps" by David A. Webb TAB Books, Blue Ridge Summit, Pennsylvania ISBN = 0-8306-2918-1

Scanned and formatted for you by The WEE Scot -- paul macGregor

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