Seventh Soap – General Purpose Soap # 2

My very first soap was one that I had hoped would be a soap that could be used for the face, body and hands for people with normal skin – hence the name “General Purpose Soap”.  It will come as no surprise that while the idea was sound, the recipe itself was not!  Making soap is fairly easy.  Making a soap that does exactly what we are looking for is much harder to do.  The General Purpose Soap # 1 was perfectly usable – in fact it was very popular – but I thought that I could do better and wanted to come back and revisit it.

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Fourth Soap – Lard # 1

Almost there, catching up on things that I have already made.  The trouble is, I’m still making things as I write the blog so the finish line keeps on getting further and further away!  But seeing as talking or writing about soap is very high on my list of pastimes, this is certainly no bad thing.

This soap was a collection of new things for me.  As it was my fourth soap, that is not hard to imagine.  But it was the first time using lard, the first time using oats and the first time using Hot Process.  I will post about the different process (hot and cold) at a later point, but as a wee introduction it means that I heated the soap batter in a slow cooker until it was completely soap and then I put in the essential oils and moulded it all up.  In Cold Process, the soap batter becomes soap in the mould and requires more time.

In the olden days, before vegetable based oils were widely available and affordable, people made soap with animal fats.  Lard is from pig fat while Tallow comes Continue Reading…

Third Soap – Castile # 1

The third soap that I made (on the 6th January 2014) is a Castile soap, another one that has a particular purpose – it is a soap made with only one oil, Olive Oil. It’s named after the Castile region of Spain where it was originally produced using the same techniques as with Aleppo soap but without the Laurel oil which makes an Aleppo what it is. As laurel oil wasn’t easy to get hold of so far west, soap was just made with the abundant olive oil. A Castile has no other oil than olive – some people market soap with mostly olive oil as Castile but it is actually Bastile, a soap with Continue Reading…