Pollywogs!

Last week, we made some soap.  It was interesting, and it takes forever to get to the results…so as we got our scale in today, I got impatient and made some more!  But I did use some of the original batch first…

After twenty-four hours of saponification and hardening, you should pop the soap out of the mold you used, and cut it into bars while it is still soft enough to do so.  The bars should sit for four to six weeks as they potentially continue saponification, and definitely lose water through evaporation.  You turn them over halfway through the drying process to help them dry evenly…

Ugly!

Still ugly!

Three Castile soaps

That fragment on the left is a piece I took into the shower with me to try out.  As far as I can tell, it was fully saponified as I didn’t get any stinging or dryness on sensitive skin from unreacted lye.  It lathered nicely and was very smooth, but wasn’t terribly strong.  This may be due to being a rather small piece.  It very much reminded me of the Dr. Bronners Castile I use to shave with, the middle bar above.  The bar on the right is a very simple Castile soap we picked up in State College.  One problem I have identified is that I really, really don’t like the smell of Wintergreen for my soap, as it smells like candy and I don’t like smelling candy in the shower before breakfast…

This first batch is a little expensive with the coconut oil, and I was impatient to try new things.  The next soap I wanted was a very utilitarian soap used for laundry: as cheap and as simple as possible.

16 ounces of olive oil at $0.21/oz, 2.05 ounces of lye at $0.25/oz, 5.76 ounces of water at basically free and 1/2 teaspoon of salt at basically free.   This will make a laundry (or body) soap for very roughly $0.64 per four ounce bar ((16*.21)+(2.05*.25))≈3.87 for 24 ounces or ≈.64 for four ounces.  I didn’t feel like waiting around and mixed the ingredients at 120′F  instead of 100′F.  I was also more aggressive with the stick blender.  The soap traced in short order, and I poured it into a slightly fancier mold…

No fragrance (alcohol?) = different color

Ankle brace packaging into soap mold!

I also decided to try something called CPOP, as it suits my infantile need for instant gratification.  I decided not to take pictures of this after an hour in the oven…I think the temperature was too high.  We’ll see what I can salvage.  Maybe if it’s amusing and not depressing, I’ll add photos tomorrow.  Also, it was only a 7 ounce batch of soap and the smaller the batch the more important the accuracy of your measurements become…I’m not the most accurate when I think I can fudge something…

If this (the non-CPOP soap) looks normal tomorrow night, I’m gonna be ready to throw caution to the wind and get serious about making a couple pounds of real soap!