Wonderful peaceful day here in Jonesville. Our big event for the day was making our own soap. Diane had made some with friends last week.. and I’d made some recently.. so we decided to make some together. It’s good clean fun !

The process starts with pure sodium hydroxide.. or Lye.. as it’s also called. It’s used to unclog drains among other things. It’s nasty stuff. toxic, caustic and reactive..

We got our safety glasses  and gloves on and measured the stuff out.

 (Note.. always add lye to water.. NEVER add water to lye.. it splatters violently !)

As soon as you add it to water it starts a pretty amazing exothermic reaction.. the water quickly heats up to a near boil..

While we waited for the lye solution to cool, we went in and measured out our fats.. We were using a mix of olive oil, coconut oil and hydrogenated palm oil (crisco).. I’ve also made it from lard in the past. (yuck)   Here’s us thawingign the coconut oil.. when you see what it does in the fridge, you realize what this stuff might do in your arteries..

We melted all the fats together

Then cooled them to a lukewarm 80 degrees F.

We then took the fat outside and poured it into our soap bucket

Then Diane added the Lye solutin that we’d also cooled to 80 degrees F.

We then started blending it with a hand mixer.. It immediately started to react and become soap through the process of ‘saponification’

Miraculously it began to set in just about 10 minutes.. compared to the 3 hours both dinae and I had to wait in our last two batches.. must have been the highly hydrogenated oils we were using in this batch

It was soon the consistency of stiff cake batter. Diane added coloring (we used the spice Tumeric) .. and some scent we’d found..

THen Diane poured it into a cardboard box we’d lined with wax paper

It was already so thick we had to spread it ourselves.

We added a SamStone for the final touch !

Then we wrapped it up and put it away to cure for a week. I’ll let you all knwo how it comes out !

That was pretty much the day.. except that I finally got around to cleaning up my lab a bit.. Here it is before..

Here it is after.. not a huge difference.. .. but it helps