Soapmaking 101

Baby Stepping through friends… here we go!
Measure out your hard oils, which are coconut oil and lard. These two will need to be melted to get ready for your soaping. Measure exactly and go ahead and put them on low in your soap pot and melt them gently.
Measure out your liquid oils

Measure your lye. I like to keep a glass measuring cup just for this purpose. It has a pouring spout to make transferring your lye into water a breeze.
Remember…
Lye into water is so much smarter!
Always pour your lye into water, that way there are no splashes!

Here’s my water waiting in an empty sink.
I thought this was a great place to do the lye solution because if there ever was an accident, this would be the place to contain it.
Thankfully there has been no issue whatsoever, so far. 🙂

Lye into water!

Mix well!

Now, I don’t have a picture for the waiting time, but this is our rule of thumb for both containers. The lye solution container and the oils in the pot. Once you have given them both time to cool, you should be able to feel the bottom of the container and feel warmth. If it is hot to the touch… they are NOT ready. If you can rest your hand against the bottom of container and it is warm… You are ready for mixing.

Once comfortable to touch, take it to a spot where you can plug in your immersion blender and pour your lye into your oils and get ready to BLEND!
This process can take a little while 5 minutes to even a little longer… It really depends on your recipe. Thankfully this one is easy and basic and doesn’t take that long.

You want to blend, blend, blend, without stopping til you have a nice pudding type consistency. Meaning if you were to pick the blender up and some soap dropped off the blender it would sit on the top of the mixture. Does that make sense? I tried to capture it in a picture. This is called trace.

See how goopy it is? That’s what you want.

Ladle your soap into your container. I made a simple container just to show y’all that it doesn’t have to be a mold like the one on the left. Soap can easily be made in pretty much anything!

Here’s a bar that came out of the mold I made. I put some oats at the bottom for exfoliating. I also added just a bit of peppermint oil at trace to give it a light scent.

In 24 hours, you can take your soap out of your mold. Set it in a place that there is good ventilation. This will help in curing your soap. Your soap will set up and cure in about 4 weeks. The longer the soap sets, the dryer it will become and the longer it will last.