Soapmaking

On Sunday, my mom and I decided to make soap. Well, actually, we decided to make soap last week together when she was here visiting. So, I ordered a soapmaking kit from Nussbaum Family Soaps. It arrived Wednesday and we were set to go by Sunday to make our soap! Mom brought lavender flowers and lavender oil that her neighbor friend so kindly gave her to use! We read all the instructions in the manual twice and then we got started! Lye is pretty caustic stuff, so use goggles, masks and gloves when handling.

We have our pans ready for the soap!

After lots and lots of stirring the soap to develop a trace, our soap was ready to pour into the pans to set up. Here is my pan after the second day of sitting. Tomorrow it might be ready to cut in to bars and then set to cure for 4-6 weeks.

It really wasn't that hard to make the soap and I honestly look forward to making it again sometime! Only this time, I would probably get my own supplies instead of ordering it through a kit and thus I would make a larger batch of soap at one time.
It seems like aquiring lye is a harder thing to do locally. I found a supplier online called: The Lye Guy. I will probably try them next time.

At any rate, it was lots of fun and really neat to see that we could make our own soap!