Having really enjoyed the first salt bars and was getting low on stock – this gave me a great chance to experiment with a couple of changes to the previous recipe.
A member on the Soap Making Forum had posted some interesting ideas on changes to the oils. The previous recipe had 15% Olive oil, but this time I changed that to 10% Avocado oil, upping the Coconut oil amount to 85%.
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For my ninth soap I decided to revist one of my first soaps again. It is something I think is worthwhile as I would rather have made a few recipes that I am happy with rather than a lot of recipes that I don’t feel are really quite there yet. Continue Reading…
This batch of soap was planned from the beginning with The Admirable Lady in mind. That might seem a little sexist, of course, but there is something about it that I feel is just very lady-like – I think it could be the associations of bathing in milk and Cleopatra, or the inclusion of honey which lends it a more softer, feminine appeal. Continue Reading…
This was a type of soap that I was particularly looking forward to making. I had read a lot of good things about Salt Bars before, looked in to what made them so special and was eager to try it out for myself.
An average soap will not lather in salt water – the salt saturates the water and inhibits the way that the bubbles are formed. With that in mind, it seems strange to add salt to a soap.
Salt bars counter this issue by Continue Reading…
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…
Getting back to soaps, but still catching up on soaps made before the blog started, today I want to talk about the second soap that I made on the 14th December 2013 – a nice Pine Tar soap.
This type of soap is one of the reasons why I started this whole thing. It’s a classic recipe, used from the 1800s through to early 1900s. It fell out of fashion somewhat, as many of the things I make have. This was mainly due to the carcinogenic properties of Creosote that often ended up in Pine Tar products. But a good Pine Tar Continue Reading…
Again, very late with this post as I made my first soap on the 17 November 2013.
As a first batch, I wanted to go for something easy to make, wouldn’t put up too much of a fight or anything, but would also be useful. I know a lot of people who suggest using Continue Reading…