Strawberries and Cream Soap

Frozen strawberry juice, strawberry preserves, grated soap and organic cream

 Yesterday I made hand milled Strawberries and Cream Soap. As you can see, the freshly cut loaf reveals a more reddish interior, where it hasn’t dried. I believe it will dry brown. Too bad. 

Fresh cut soap

Unfortunately, it doesn’t smell of the wonderful strawberries I grew myself. This is why soap makers add color and fragrance to their soaps. It simply makes soap more appealing. If someone has sensitive skin, however, they may want just the bare essentials. There are wonderful natural colorants and essential oils that can be added to future batches. Right now, my aim is to see what will happen just going with the basics.

No, this is not food!

This non-hand milled soap has these ingredients: saponified virgin olive oil, turmeric powder, annatto powder and cocoa powder. It’s more aesthetically pleasing, don’t you think? It was fun to make, too.

Science and Soaping

I have been soaping my little heart out. Almost every day I can be found tinkering with recipe ingredients, researching the internet, making soap or just plain pondering what wonderful botanical elements can be added that will make skin and the bodies it is attached to-- happy!

My new crock pot from Goodwill!

I learn something new every day. Science has never been my interest, or my strong point, yet I find soap making fascinating. I am concentrating on making hand milled soap. This means simply: make the plain soap and then grate it and re-melt it, adding substances from nature.

Because this soap has already undergone the saponification process in the first round, I can control the heat applied to the new ingredients added. The problem with the saponification process is that ingredients are exposed to extremely high temperatures, many times nullifying the beneficial effects of the botanicals.

Making herbal tea for soap

Another reason I like making hand milled soap is that I can make very small batches, not risking a lot in the experimentation process. In addition, if I have someone who wishes a few bars of cucumber soap for example, it will be available after much less cure time.

By the way, the cucumber soap has shrunk in the curing process, loosing about 30% of its mass so far. It still smells of the wonderful cucumber from which it was made, no fragrances added.See below the green bar and compare it to the others in size. The fattest bars are the newest.

I am enjoying adding to my soaps dried, frozen and infused plant materials from the Garden of Nemesis. I know that none of these plants have been exposed to toxins such as insecticides, chemical fertilizers or herbicides. No, I have had no governmental agency looking over my shoulder or “certifying” these dozen years of gardening this plot. My conscience and my love for the Earth has been my guide. 

So far, I have incorporated: chamomile, calendula, annatto, turmeric, plantain, rosemary, lavender and many more interesting and subtly colored and fragrant botanicals.

Adventures in Soaping

I am obsessed. Soaping is like making preserves only much more experimental. 

Re-melting lard soap

 I've grated and melted the original lard soap and to the above batch added chamomile and calendula teas and a smidgeon of honey.

Results of hand milled Chamomile and Calendula

I’ve continued along the botanical path, hand milling and adding plant material. 

Cucumber Soap

 To the above soap, I added cucumber puree I had frozen from the garden last fall. It smells great!

Carrot Soap

To the above, I added a few drops of lavender essential oil and strained carrots from the garden.

First batch of pure olive oil soap

I added nothing to this batch of olive oil soap, as I will hand mill and add botanicals. Note there was a bit of crumbling when it was cut. It sat in the mold for three days before it was dry enough to unmold. It's still very soft and must cure.

My head is swimming with ideas. I’m making small batches and taking detailed notes for later reference. The internet is great! It's been my only teacher.

Gramma’s Soap

I gave myself the gift of new experience yesterday, when I made my first batch of bar soap. I call it “Gramma’s” because it is the type of soap she might have made a century ago. My mother, born in 1922, was so darn happy have “store-bought,

"Curing" Lard/Lye Soap

instead of that horrible lye soap” her mother made. What she didn’t realize is that all bar soap has lye as an ingredient. It’s the only way to make fats “saponify” and harden into bars.

I imagine that Gramma didn’t have a digital scale to weigh her ingredients. I imagine she made her lye direct from hardwood ashes like all the generations before her. I imagine she spent hours rendering lard and tallow. I imagine there may have been times when every bit of lye did NOT saponify and accidentally irritated tender skin. I tried the new soap and it was not only was non-irritating, but actually skin-softening.

I did it!

Now that I have my basic soap, I can make some hand-milled herbal bars. I will also make it into dish soap and shampoo. It won’t be long before all of the toxic petro-chemicals are absent from this household.

Tropical Mandevilla

Every year, a friend of mine gets two pricy Mandevilla Dipladenia plants from her kids for her birthday. She likes the “Red Riding Hood” for its scarlet blooms. In the fall of 2011, I caught her as she was getting ready to throw them out at the end of the season and asked if I could take them home. I placed them by an east window and over-wintered them. In the spring, I re-potted them and set the two pots on the inside of the trellis on which the purple clematis grow. They climbed over the top and began to bloom just as the clematis finished. They were a beautiful splash of color for the rest of the summer.

Blooms ready to open

 I repeated the process the second year, but jumped the gun in the spring and set them out too early. I lost one of them to a cold snap.

In the fall of 2012, I once again cut the plant back and moved it into the house. In the spring of 2013, I took three stems from the remaining plant and looped them down, “pinning” them in the soil at the base with plastic forks. Since the pot was behind the pergola swing, I couldn’t check it easily, so left well enough alone. Sure enough, when I was ready to take the plant in for the winter I had three new well-rooted starts, which I placed into their own pots. So, for 2014, I have four plants to transfer to the garden in when the temperature is consistently over 50 degrees. Can’t wait!

Making Laundry Soap

2004 Oops!

The internet is rife with recipes for homemade laundry soap. Yesterday, a friend and I embarked upon that adventure. It was so darn easy and so darn cheap. We asked ourselves what took us so long?

The snow was flying as the Fels-Naptha bar was grated and put in a few cups of water to melt on the stove at low heat. After about 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, the half cup each of Borateem and Washing soda were added. When it was well blended, the mixture was poured into a bucket with 2 gallons of hot water. Then we poured it into our saved plastic containers to 1/3 full.

Finished Product

The mixture was gelled this morning, so all we have to do is add water until the jug is 2/3 full and shake. I’m doing my first load as we speak. It smells wonderful. We figure we each have enough soap to do laundry for about six months at half cup a load. The supplies cost about three dollars!