Eight Acres

I've been wanting to try making soap with milk for ages.  We haven't been milking our cows, so I was waiting for a friend to have enough goat's milk to spare.  I know I could just buy milk, but that seemed like a strange thing to do (you start to forget that milk comes from the shop when you've been milking a cow for a few years!).  Anyway, I was happy to wait as I had plenty of other soap to make. While I was waiting, I also received a review copy of a new soapmaking book called  The Natural Soap Making Book for Beginners: Do-It-Yourself Soaps Using All-Natural Herbs, Spices, and Essential Oils  (Affiliate link), by Kelly Cable of the blog Simple Life Mom .  Kelly has an amazing Etsy shop full of soaps and natural lotions, so I am very excited that she has decided to share her experience and recipes in this book.  And seeing as it contains several goat milk soap recipes and my friend finally had some goat milk to spare, I recently got my chanc...

Have you heard of a soap saver?  I hadn't until recently.  A friend mentioned to me that she was putting the small bits of soap in a sock and that I should think about crocheting a little bag instead.  And then they keep popping up on social media, so I thought I would give it a go.  Am I the only one who hoards the little end bit of soaps that are too small to use?  I have a bit of a collection of them.  So I whipped up a little soap saver sack and filled it up with a few odd soap ends and I'm very pleased with the results.  If you can do basic crochet, they are very easy to make, but you can also knit or sew a simple soap saver (or last resort - use an old sock!). Crochet soap saver pattern I used cotton yarn from the local market.  You could use any yarn.  I liked cotton as it can be composted (wool, hemp, bamboo or sisal would also be compostable). Chain 6, turn Chain 1 and single crochet back along the chain Don't turn, but k...

I'm not saying that I never make soaping mistakes, but I have figured out how to get my recipes right 99% of the time.  I am on a soapmaking group on FB and every day or so someone will post that they forgot to add an oil or a butter to the recipe, or wondering why the soap hasn't turned out right.  I am surprised because I don't have this much trouble.  Here are three tips from my experience with soapmaking that will help you to avoid soaping mistakes: Accurate scales You can skimp on all equipment except for scales.  It is absolutely important to have stable and accurate scales so that you can measure exactly the right amount of fats/oils and caustic.  One of the biggest causes of soaping mistakes is inaccurate measurement of oils or caustic, which results in incomplete reaction and soap that turns out too soft (or too caustic/ high pH). Keep it simple The more complicated your recipe, the easier it is to make a mistake, leave something out or mea...

I may  have mentioned this before.... soap making is addictive!  Once you start, you just want to keep making more soap.  And not the same soap, you want to try all sorts of different soaps.  I made the mistake of joining a facebook group called Saponification Nation  and now my facebook newsfeed is full of glorious soaps, in all colours and shapes, which makes it even harder to resist the urge to experiment.  One soap that kept popping up a few weeks ago was soap made with beer. I generally prefer not to use ingredients just for the sake of it, I like to know that they are adding something to the properties of the finished soap.   As you know, I don't like to use artificial ingredients either (colours or fragrances).   When I read about beer in soap I found out that beer adds sugar to the mixture, which increases lather.  I use tallow in my soap, which has limited lather, so anything that adds lather could improve the soap.  ...

Blog reader Jeriann Ireland offered to send me a post about homemade health and beauty products.  This is of course an interest of mine, as I make a lot of different products myself.  Some are just personal experiments and some I share on my Etsy shop .  My reasons are much the same as Jerriann discusses in this post - save money, know the ingredients and take control of your health.  Jeriann is a writer and crafter who makes homemade body care products and fun craft items, mostly as gifts for her friends and family. She loves learning about beneficial and harmful ingredients in everyday products and finding alternatives that fit her health goals. See more of her writing at dairyairhead.com . ********* I used to think that “health and beauty” as a category was a bit odd. Health and beauty aren’t necessarily related. You can be healthy and ugly, and you can be beautiful and sick. But when you look at what society considers beautiful, it’s often tied to ...

Soapmaking seems to be quite an addictive hobby.  Luckily I can sell it, otherwise we would have soap to last a lifetime already.  My latest recipe uses honey and beeswax from our hives, and oatmeal. Oatmeal has a soothing effect on skin, and also helps to retain essential oil scent in the soap.  The honey provides both colour and healing properties.  Beeswax is added to this soap to make it harder and provide a subtle honey scent.  This soap will get very hot due to the honey.  When adding beeswax, its best to cut it into small pieces or grate it, so that it will dissolve quickly, otherwise you will be stuck stirring your fats and oils after everything else is ready! Like all my soaps, I like to use tallow in the recipe.  You can read more about why I use tallow and find all my other soap recipes in the posts linked further down.  I am currently working on an ebook with all my tallow soap recipes and a step-by-step guide to cold process...

As you know, I really don't like using chemicals in the house or for the animals, but it is gradual process to reduce and change what we use.  For the laundry, we already use a grey-water friendly product, as all the washing-machine water is used to water my vege garden , however I was sure there was still opportunities to improve.  I'd read a bit about soap nuts and thought about it and hadn't done anything about it until I saw them at the local market and finally bought some.  I admit that I was a little skeptical, and I do have a boilermaker husband who can come home in some pretty dirty work clothes, so these soap nuts had a challenge ahead of them. soap nuts are actually dried berries For those who haven't heard of soap nuts, they're actually a dried berry from the  sapindus mukorossi  tree, which grows in India and Himalayas.  They are imported to Australia by various companies (just google soap nuts and you will find them).  This is the o...

I reckon there are three types of people who want to make soap: 1) people who just want to follow the recipe and don't want to understand the chemistry behind soapmaking 2) people who want to know enough to design their own recipes, but not the full detail 3) chemistry geeks who want to know everything about soapmaking The third type are probably the rarest, but that is the category that I fall into, having studied chemical engineering, I do find the chemistry and process detail very interesting (and I know a few chemistry geeks who will join me here).  I recently found a book that satisfies that interest, Scientific Soapmaking: The Chemistry of the Cold Process , by Kevin M Dunn (Affiliate link) . This book explains in great detail how oils and fats react with caustic soda to make soap, how to test and standardise your soap and how different processing conditions affect the final product.  You can following through different experiments in the book to see ...

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. 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 butcherin...

For all of my soap recipes I use 1 kg of oils (including tallow), the amount of caustic to react with the oils (a little less to allow for " superfat ") and about 330 mL of water.  Someone asked me recently why I don't specify an exact amount of water.  I had to go back to my soap-making book ( Soap Naturally  - affiliate link) to check where that ratio came from. honey and oatmeal soap (tallow base) The water in soap making isn't actually part of the reaction.  The soap reaction is between the oils and the caustic soda (sodium hydroxide).  As the caustic soda is solid, it wouldn't disperse well and react evenly if we just added caustic soda granules to the oil.  We dissolve the caustic soda in water so that we can easily mix the caustic soda with the oil to facilitate an even reaction.  This is why measuring the exact amount of water to the mL is not important. However, you do need to know approximately how much water to use.  If you u...

Every time I get confident with soapmaking I try something new and find that its not as easy as I thought.  I have pretty well perfected my basic soap recipes: 100% tallow soap Lemon balm herbal soap Pink clay soap Neem oil soap Coffee grounds soap Activated charcoal soap Shaving soap Using salt in soap I decided to try a couple of recipes that use salt -  soap with pink salt as an exfoliant , and then  soap with salt water  in the lye to make a harder bar (its called soleseife in German).  Salt is supposed to produce a nice lather and a soft, soothing soap.  I sprinkled larger lumps of salt on top the exfoliant bar.  See below for the recipes adapted for tallow. It looked good in the moulds! Everything went well until I came to cut the soap.  I left it in the mould for a couple of days, as I usually do.  When we tried to cut the soap it crumbled.  No mater what we tried, the cutter than came with the cut...