My First Attempt at Soap-making€

One fine day, many years ago, I thought that I would like to learn to make soap. I’m crafty, this is a craft, so why not?

Yes, all soap makers can groan right about here. It gets worse, believe me.

Being a smart girl, I do my research. Oil + water + lye = soap. Being a chemist, I know that lye is sodium hydroxide, NaOH, and just generally nasty stuff. Certainly not something you want to play with unless you take the proper precautions.

I figured I would start simple - castile soap. Olive oil, water, and lye. No additives of any sort…no scent, no colors, no herbs, nothing. Just pure soap.

I get everything all set up and ready to go. Measure the water, measure the lye, dump the lye into the water.

Here’s where it starts to get hilarious actually. When I measured the water, I used fluid ounces. If you’re not a soaper, this means nothing. If you are, you know that this is NOT what you want to do. Basically what I did was measure the volume, not the weight. These can be very different!

But, regardless, from what I remember, the lye water didn’t go too badly. No volcano, and the solution turned clear, with no lye granules on the bottom. Of course, my mind could be remembering incorrectly, because it was quite a while ago!

I started measuring my oil after mixing the lye and water. Again, I used fluid ounces. (Wrong! But I didn’t know any better then.)

Heated it all up, very carefully. Got the oil at about the same temperature as the lye water, then poured the lye solution into the oils. And stirred.

And stirred.

And stirred.

And stirred.

And stirred some more. I stirred that damn thing for hours.

After several hours (and one VERY sore arm!), I still hadn’t reached trace. Of course, I didn’t really know what trace was then either, so I wasn’t sure what it would look like once I got there. Somewhere I had seen that you could put the soap mixture in a low temp oven and get it to trace that way. So I stuck the pot into the oven, with the door propped open slightly.

Yeah, that didn’t work. Somehow, it went from where it was (at an uber-light trace, if I remember right) to this strange solid-ish mass with oils floating on the top. Crap! I pulled it out of the oven and stirred mightily once more.

For the record, that didn’t work either.

Not knowing any better, I mixed it all up, and dumped it into my prepared mold. Wrapped it in the blanket as suggested and cleaned up the kitchen, all the while thinking that maybe this soap thing was harder than it sounded.

The next day, I went to go unmold my soap so I could cut it into bars. What greeted me upon unwrapping the blanket was a strange crystalline growth out of a sea of oil. My best guess is that there wasn’t enough water, enough oil, and way too much lye, so that the lye simply fell out of solution and recrystallized.

Needless to say, I threw that batch away. Not like you can use straight up lye (or other unknown crystalline substances) as a soap without causing yourself some serious harm.

It took me several years to get up my courage to try this craft again….but that’s another story.

*Crawling out from under that big rock*

School is kicking my booty! After the next two weeks are over, I should be back to normal though. Whatever normal actually consists of! *ha!*

I've been sneaking in crafting here and there for the past couple of months. It's a hard job, but sometimes you just have to make something pretty!

Tomorrow will bring a nice trip down memory lane. :)