Yesterday I made a largeish batch of hemp and castor oil soap, with a bit of olive oil thrown in for good measure.
Yesterday I made a largeish batch of hemp and castor oil soap, with a bit of olive oil thrown in for good measure.
Making liquid soap is daunting because it’s a weird process. But it’s also pretty simple. In fact, the full description of the process takes longer to read and understand than actually doing the work.
I’ve produced this as a single recipe with quantities for a member of The Commentariat(tm) who wants to give it a try. So where I put specific quantities, you can use them and make exactly what I did, or there are links at the bottom for how to compute your own quantities based on different oils.
This process takes about 4 hours start to finish, but you’ll only actually do a little work. But you have to be there to deal with it; you can’t just leave your soap on the stove like you would a cat or a child or something…
Lovely lemon balm and lemongrass-scented: 9mm soapgun:
After reading Caine’s post about the Standing Rock Camp, I felt kind of frantic: I want to do something but my instincts are not the right ones for this situation. Other than throw money in the money-bucket, which I’ve already done, I … ugh.
Caine wrote about a tragic incident in which a cop shot a volunteer to death, because they used a real gun in a training exercise, and – it was loaded. That’s incredibly stupid, especially since you can get really nice poly rubber training guns on Amazon.com for $25.
And then I remembered stories about prisoners carving guns out of soap to try to fool guards into freeing them.. ..
We were sitting around in my kitchen, after I had just helped her make her first batch of soap. The room smelled of frankincense and we were eating pizza washed down with red wine.
If you’re like most of us, you buy a variety of surfactant products: for your dishes, for your body, for your clothes – some of them are quite expensive. Most of them are made of the cheapest possible stuff. It’s not really hard to do better than the manufacturers do. It’s also fun to learn how to read the ingredients of soaps in hotels and stores – yeah, that “vegan” soap bar with the “sodium tallowate” in it? That’s beef fat.
Hot weather is a good time for soap-making. It makes it easy to mix the oils: leave your shea butter and coconut oil on the porch in the sun and they are liquid in 10 minutes. Molds dry quickly in the heat, and the soap doesn’t have any problem gelling – in the winter I have to leave it in the oven overnight (risking a soap volcano!) Summer soap just sits on the counter overnight and it’s ready to go in the morning.