Skip to main content

Simplifying soapmaking - guest post

I know a lot of people would like to try making soap, but are put off by the cost of ingredients and equipment, the perceived danger of using caustic or the complexity of the recipes. Soap making does not have to be expensive, dangerous or complex. I want to share a few tips to get you started with simple soap making, and demystify the process to make it more accessible to everyone who would like to give it a try. You can start with a simple soap and add more ingredients as you get more comfortable with the process.

I wrote a guest post for Say Little Hen, pop over there to find out how simple soapmaking can be.



eight acres: simplifying soapmaking - a guest post



Here's a few links to my previous soapmaking posts.

Why use natural soaps and salves?
I prefer to use natural products, rather than commercial soaps and lotions with unknown and unnecessary ingredients.

Making tallow soap 
This is my first post about soapmaking, and I used tallow right from the start because we have so much leftover from butchering our own beef.  Its very cheap to buy from the butcher, and its a sustainable ingredient (especially if you eat beef anyway).  It makes great soap too!

Its very easy to render tallow from beef fat.  The kidney fat makes the best soap as its hard and white.

Here's a couple of basic recipes for tallow soap - a bath soap and a cleaning soap.

I was very happy to finally master a 100% tallow recipe (the other recipes had 50% tallow, with coconut and olive oil making up the rest of the oils).

I started to have more fun with my soap here, and learnt how to add other natural ingredients for colour and texture.

Shaving soap and A sustainable shave?
I made Pete shaving soap in little tins.  You can use that with a shaving brush instead of shaving cream.

Coffee grounds help to remove dirt and odours, great for hard workers!
Neem oil is a healing oil for the skin, as well as an insect repellent.  It can be used as a pet soap, for kids with knits or adults with damaged skin.
My latest recipe for a lovely black soap with detoxifying properties.

It hasn't all gone to plan - this batch never set due to not using enough lye, but I rebatched using the hot process method.
And salt soap needs to be cut while its still hot, I had to rebatch this one too.  The photo above is a more successful attempt at salt soap.



What do you think? Do you make soap? Is it simpler than it sounds?


You can get all my tallow soap recipes in my eBook Make Your Own Natural Soap, more information here.

 Would you like to try making your own soap from natural ingredients, but don’t know where to start? 
This eBook will take you through everything you need to know to make simple soaps from natural ingredients, including herbs, clays, charcoal, oatmeal and coffee grounds.

It also explains how to use tallow in soap. Tallow is cheap and locally available, and it makes long-lasting moisturising soaps, it is an under-utilised ingredient in home soapmaking in my opinion. This eBook includes 10 recipes specifically designed for tallow soap.

Basic Tallow Soap
Pink Clay Soap
Green Herb Soap
True Grit Soap
Black Magic Soap
Salt Spa Soap
Honey and Oatmeal Soap
Neem Oil Soap
Sustainable Shaving soap
Cleaning Soap
Formulate your own

Labels:

Comments

  1. I have just had some soap molds arrive and I am getting ingredients together, its on my to do list for this year :-)

    ReplyDelete

  2. It's so addictive isn't it Liz? One day my efforts will look as professional as yours, but for now, rustic has to be OK. Thanks for the intro to Say Little Hen blog (which will be going onto my favorites list) and that tidy little link to my blog too. :)

    ReplyDelete

  3. I have made olive oil soap which I found to be a bit soft and expensive but switched to 100% tallow soap once we started having cows processed as I wanted to make sure we were using all of the animal where possible. I like the tallow soap and find it very cheap to make and nice to use.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Thanks, I appreciate all your comments, suggestions and questions, but I don't always get time to reply right away. If you need me to reply personally to a question, please leave your email address in the comment or in your profile, or email me directly on eight.acres.liz at gmail.com

Popular posts from this blog

What to do with eight acres

Behind the scenes of my blog I can see the search terms that led people to find my blog.  It can be quite interesting to look through them occasionally and see what people are looking for.  Most of them involve chicken tractors, but another question that comes up regularly is “what can you do with eight acres?” or “how much land is eight acres?”.  Today I will try to answer this question.

Of course it is a very broad question, there are lots and lots of things you can do with eight acres, but I’m going to assume that you want to live there, feed your family and maybe make a little extra money.  I make that assumption because that’s what I know about, if you want to do something else with your eight acres, you will need to look somewhere else.

If you haven’t chosen your land yet, here a few things to look for.  Focus on the things you can’t change and try to choose the best property you can find in your price range.  Look for clean water in dams, bores or wells, either on the property …
8 comments
Read more

Growing and eating chokos (chayotes)

Cooking chokos (not be confused with another post about cooking chooks) has been the subject of a few questions on my blog lately, so here's some more information for you.
Chokos - also known as Chayote, christophene or christophine, cho-cho, mirliton or merleton, chuchu, Cidra, Guatila, Centinarja, Pipinola, pear squash, vegetable pear, chouchoute, güisquil, Labu Siam, Ishkus or Chowchow, Pataste, Tayota, Sayote - is a vine belonging to the Cucurbitaceae family, along with pumpkins, squash and melons, with the botanical name Sechium edule.


The choko contains a large seed, like a mango, but if you pick them small enough it is soft enough to eat.  If you leave the choko for long enough it will sprout from one end and start to grow a vine.  To grow the choko, just plant the sprouted choko and give the vine a structure to climb over.  In summer, the vine will produce tiny flowers that will eventually swell into choko fruit.  The vine doesn't like hot dry weather.  And it doesn&#…
18 comments
Read more

Native bee hotel

Like I wrote back here, native pollinators are as important (if not more important) than honey bees for pollinating crops and native plants.  There are a few things you can do to attract native pollinators to your garden:

Grow flowers and let your veges flower to feed the pollinators all yearHave a source of insect-friendly water in the garden (shallow dishes are best)Provide somewhere for them to live/nest/lay eggs - a bee hotel! In Australia, our native pollinators consist of both stingless native bees, which live in a colony like honey bees, and lots of solitary bees and wasps.  These solitary insects are just looking for a suitable hole to lay their eggs.  You may be familiar with these in sub-tropical and tropical areas, in summer you will find any and all holes, pipes and tubes around the house plugged with mud by what we call "mud daubers".  These area a real nuisance, so I'd rather provide some custom holes near the garden where they can live instead, so I don'…
4 comments
Read more