Anybody make lye soap?
 

The cooking and Craft forum has a lot of soapmakers on there! I am only a novice so I wouldn't be much help. There are also recipes on line that seem to work pretty well.

I make soap using lye, fats/oils and water. The simplest soap recipe to start with is 100% olive oil soap (Castille) because the chemical reaction between olive oil and the lye is fairly slow and that allows you to see the changes happen gradually instead of in a minute or two. Making your first batch or two without adding scents also simplifies the process because essential and fragrance oils can accelerate the chemical reaction :eek: and you can end up with solidifying soap before you can even pour it into the mold! I should also mention that some scents can't be used when making soap because the flash point (temp at which it explodes into flames) of the scent is too low. Buy scents from soapmaking suppliers that can tell you the flash point of the scent and who pre-test scents in real batches of soap before selling to the public.

Rather than try to explain the whole process here, please visit these great websites:
www.teachsoap.com
www.soapnuts.com

Please pay particular attention to the safety hazards discussed. Lye can be a dangerous chemical if used/handled improperly, but there are simple steps you can take to protect yourself and your household from those dangers.

Hope this helps,
Deb
in WI

Those web sites have wonderful info. I make lots of soap and probably the best thing that I ever did was buy one of those $10 hand held mixer things...... a single stick with a blade on it unstead of the two beaters for a regular mixer. I think that it is supposed to be used for making smoothies and shakes. Really does a great job with soap making and saves my poor goat milking hands alot of stirring.
Tana Mc

Thanks for the links and hints. They are much appreciated :happy:

If you say you make lye soap and you really don't, are you a lyer?

IMO the easiest soap to start with is one with tallow. If you go 100% OO you are going to be stirring and stirring FOREVER. A tallow (or lard) mix with OO will give you a quicker trace (the pudding stage that means you have soap) and if you don't like it or it turns out fugly, you still have some useful laundry soap. You can find lard in places like groceries stores (regrigerated around here), Walmart (same brand as groc stores, but the package is on the shelves, go figure) or go really rustic and visit a butcher and render your own.
Another good soap site is http://www.millersoap.com/
Good calculator is here: http://www.thesage.com/ (A calculator is necessary to figure out the ratios between oils and lye).
Have fun and make lots of room on your shelves for all the supplies you will need to support your new habit :D

http://www.thymeforewe.com/handmade_soap.html

This is a basic recipe with oils you should be able to find in a grocery store. You might need to get the coconut oil in a health food store.

We make it. It's fun and easy. Find a recipe and learn to make that one soap ... then try a little something else. It takes time, but it's worth it. The fun of doing it and the soap is just better.
Try to Google soap recipes.

I just made a fun batch with, of all things, bacon drippings saved from a few months of breakfasts! Half drippings (melted down and then strained of all the cracklings), half olive oil, a little ground oatmeal, GOAT MILK of course, a little honey and a tablespoon of ground cloves as the scent. It is the prettiest soap and smells like the best oatmeal cookies you ever baked!
Have fun! Soap making is a blast!

Hey...NYhomesteader...if you DO make soap are you lyeing! :sing: We are punny aren't we!?

i am fixing to shred my soap and remelt and add the essential oils to it. Haven't gotten the essential oils to come through when adding at trace. Guess the lye is killing them.

I am remelting cause i made several molds of different shapes out of some cherrywood and am going to pour them into 4oz bars.

steve

As long as we keep it clean! LOL

I too am a soaper and would suggest the lard or tallow blend to begin with. Tallow makes a real nice hard beginner bar that is very traditional looking.

Also do a google for the Soap Dish Index, a tremendous soapers resource. Very very informative!

HTH!

Nance

Do you folks make your soap indoors, or out?

I do all of mine inside now. I have, however, rendered down my tallow in a big cast iron kettle over an open fire. It's cool to do once or twice so you get the "whole feel" of soaping. I have an old press that we squeezed the cracklins through as it cooked down.

I wear a mask or a bandana when I add my lye to the water though because the fumes can really hurt (burn :flame: ) your sinuses. I also always wear goggles when doing the lye. You need to be extremely aware of what you are doing while handling the lye. It's not something to be careless with at all. It can be handled and it is a tool to be used but just respect it, ok? No shortcuts. :nono: :) rubber gloves & long sleeves too.

I've been getting soap fever lately so it must be time to start soaping again! Thanks for the incentive!

Nance

We have a soapmaking page on our site:

http://www.mullerslanefarm.com/soapmaking.html

It has pictures of the soap making process, links to suppliers, lye calculators, soap forums & recipes.

When adding the lye crystals to the water, I am
outside. Then I get the oils measured and to
temp, timing it to reach the same temp as the
lye mixture at the same time, then the rest is
done indoors. There are still some fumes, so I
keep my face out of the pot and crack windows.

We mix the lye to the water then allow it to set and cool down over night. This is not something you have to do, but I think it allows the lye to desolve and cool down better ... so we feel safer doing it this way.
Someone told me when I started ...."snow falling on water" ... remember to ALWAYS add the lye to the water ... not the water to the lye.
The rest is simple and if you mess up, it'll not get you hurt. Just watch out when using the lye.

I premix my lye to a 40% solution strength. When using this strength to make olive oil soaps, it takes a whole lot less time than the HOURS that it usually takes to make at the norma 30% solution strength. Only you have to be extremely careful to wear protective gear to make sure you don't splash any on you. I do my lye mixing and soapmaking indoors.

I like her site, but I don't recommend it to beginners because crayons should NOT be used to color lye soaps! :viking:

In their original form crayons are considered non-toxic for their intended use - coloring on paper, but you've got to remember that crayons are NOT made from just wax; most modern crayons have a fair amount of plastic in them. When you melt crayons then add them to a pot of hot lye, water & fats, you are basically creating a chemical stew that may well make a "soap" that suds, but it will also be soap that contains a bunch of unknown chemicals that came from the melted crayons.

I like making my own soap because I control what ingredients are used in the soap and I know what role they play. Using soap that was colored using melted crayons is about as appealing to me as using Dawn liquid dish detergent as a body soap.

Deb
in wi

What do you do.
 

One site says to add scents, etc. at the very end of cooking. Another states that you should mold the soap then remelt it and add scents, oatmeal, etc. I'm not going to get into that stuff untill I master the basics, but was just wondering what most soap makers do if they add these things? Also what sort of stuff do you like to add?

BTW: Thanks to all of you who have given links and info, or PM'd me with the same. Thats why I love this forum :clap:

Fancy commercial soaps are milled...the soap is made, then it gets ground up and then remelted a number of times. Commercial soap has the scent and goodies added after the last remelting process. Companies extract the glycerine during this process and then they add back the exact amount of glycerine they want. Milling soap can make it have a finer texture, but its a lot of work and I've never really seen the point of grinding up a perfectly fine batch of soap.

Most soapers I know save the grinding and remelting of soaps for "failed" batches of soap. If the appearance of the soap isn't perfect or you forgot to add the scent, then grinding up and remelting the soap gives you a chance to "fix" your soap. It takes practice to rebatch soap and I haven't felt that my rebatching attempts have had as nice results as my regular batches of soap. I usually keep the rebatched soap for home use.

I add extras after the soap pot is taken off the stove and just before the soap is poured into the mold. If you put in scents too early in the process the high temps can burn off the scent and some scents will excelerate the trace. Mixing the scent in with a small portion of the soap batch, then adding that mixture to the full batch of soap is the way to go.

I like my shower soap to have a little bit of scrubby texture. I grind old-fashioned oatmeal so the flakes are smaller, I add bit of extra oil to it so the oatmeal doesn't absorb too much oil from the batch then I add it a soap batch just before I put it in the mold. Some folks like very scrubby soap so they add cranberry or poppy seeds, but that level of grit would be too much for me.

HTH
deb
in WI

How about a Soap Star? They lie, too. :bow:

Telling you my secret, no lye.
 

I'm enjoying these puns...keep 'em coming!

Here's another fairly easy thing I've done...
since soap balls are very popular, I've let my
unscented batches cure 18-24 hrs. and
unmolded 'em. In a large bowl, I pour the
F.O./or E.O. and squish it into chunks of the
fresh soap, with some type of smooth latex
gloves on.

It won't be *pretty* at this point, just grab
scoops of the soap and pack in your hand
into a good sized ball until very firm, then
put it in a box covered with just a white
paper towel to finish the 2-4 weeks of curing.
Usually it needs just a few drops of water to
help it be more glue-like, if too dry, they'll fall
apart during use.

Don't confuse milling with re-batching. Home soapers rebatch...commercial soapmakers mill. They grind cured soap, not just a messed up batch, and press it to form a new bar. It takes specialized equipment that most of us couldn't even dream of affording :p

I never seem to have vinegar on hand, and have even heard from some folks that it's caused adverse reactions. The oil seems to do the trick for me, though, if I should get a bit of lye on myself, and it's always handy while I'm soaping!

Here's something fun...cookie cutter soaps! Pour your soap into a slab mold (use a cardboard box, like a soda flat), then when it's time to cut use a cookie cutter. The scraps can be sliced or chunked and tossed into the next batch, or cured and ground for laundry soap.

"One site says to add scents, etc. at the very end of cooking. Another states that you should mold the soap then remelt it and add scents, oatmeal, etc. I'm not going to get into that stuff untill I master the basics, but was just wondering what most soap makers do if they add these things? Also what sort of stuff do you like to add?"

No to confuse matters more, but there are basically 4 kinds of soapmaking that deal with making soap with lye:
* Cold Process (also known as CP soapmaking) - most handcrafted soapmakers use this method. Basically, it involves mixing a lye solution with melted fats & oils, reaching trace, adding scent/colorant/other additives. Then you pour it into a mold, insulate it. Next day, you cut it and then let it cure (finish the chemical reaction of becoming soap). Generally, you need to let it cure 3 to 4 weeks before using it.
* Hot Process (also known as HP) - you can do this by direct heat (stove top, called DHHP), oven (OHP), crockpot (CPHP), double boiler (DBHP). If you see a reference to "cooking" the soap, or as you mentioned, adding scent/color after "the cook", this is a reference to HP soapmaking. To HP, you follow the steps of cold process until you reach trace. Then you continue to heat the soap until the entire chemical reaction of saponification is done. Then you let the soap, which is now 100% soap, cool to a safe temperature to add scents/colorants. Then "pour" it into a mold; the consistency is very thick, so the bars are not so smooth as CP, and swirling colors is much harder to do. Generally, HP soaping requires half as much scent be used (no lye eats it up), and it is immediately useable. You can let it dry out (always a good idea, since as H20 evaporates from the bars, it makes them harder). The
* In the mold hot process (IMHP or ITMHP) - You follow the steps for CP completely to the point of adding scent/color, but instead of insulating in blankets, you put the mold in the oven at a low temp (between 170 and 200 degrees) for 1 hour, then leave the oven off & the soap in there over night. The draw back is that sometimes, the soap "volcanoes" out of the mold. This method speeds up the cure time. It can be hard on scents, though.
* Hand milled, also known as rebatch - Basically, take one of the above methods & make soap. Then grate or shred the soap. Melt the soap with a small amount of liquid in the oven, double boiler, or microwave. Then add scent/color/a bit of moisturizing oils or other additives, and put into a mold. Back when one couldnt accurately measure the amount of lye, hand milled soaps were milder because extra oils could be added to compensate for a 0% lye discount.

Editted to add that before you use any soap recipe you see on the internet, or given to you by another soaper, you should always run the recipe through a lye calculator, such as the mentioned at Majestic Mountain Sage.

Anne

Here is an old family recipe I use, doesn't cost an arm and a leg. This doesn't call for anything fancy and no special equipment. Just pretty basic lye soap like they used to make.


Basic Lye Soap

3 lb lard or shortening
1 6 1/2 oz can of lye
3 cups water

In a large pot melt the lard down and cool to 95 to 98 degrees. (I hold my hand over the pot, it should feel the same as body temperature). Just like the temperature of a baby's bottle.
Put water into a glass jar, add lye slowly, stir with the handle of a wooden spoon.
Place the lye/water jar into a bowl of cool water. This helps the mixture cool quicker. (I do this in a bowl in my sink).
I test the temperature of the lye/water the same way I test the temperature of the lard. Hold your hand over the jar, when it reaches body temperature it's ready.

When both the lard and lye/water mixture are at body temperature, slowly pour the lye/water into the lard. Stir with a wooden spoon constantly. You want as much lye as possible to reach every bit of lard.

Stir until the mixture thickens, your spoon will leave traces. Now it's ready to pour into molds. A plain box works fine. line with plastic. After pouring the soap in, cover with another sheet of plastic and a blanket, let the soap cure for at least 3 weeks before cutting into bars.

Later, you can use different oils instead of the lard, just make sure they come to 3 lb. total. You can also substitute liquids for the water, such as milk, just make sure the total liquid comes to 3 cups.

Note: I use a regular quart jar to mix my lye and water. I poke holes in the lid so the lye/water mixture comes out really slow when I add it to my lard.

Also, when I make this recipe, I do it in this order, the lard first and then I mix the lye/water while the lard is cooling. This way they reach the right temperature at the same time.

It's fun to experiment too, you can add oatmeal, scents, etc..
Just be careful and wear gloves and eye protection!

I would first rinse under running cold water until the burning eases up and diluting the lye, then maybe spray it with vinegar....I use oil as well.
I've heard of the same thing kesoaps has mentioned,
Could even be a worse problem than the lye burn itself.
I've been around NaOH for several years, had a few slight mishaps too.
The best advice I could give anyone starting out soap making is RESPECT that stuff it's very dangerous and shows no mercy.
Wear goggles and gloves! and be aware of who's around you!