Soap

I am attempting to write this while high on fumes from hair dye because my daughter and her best friend have decided to dye her hair red. Pics will come from that tomorrow. :-)

One of the things I was most excited about getting to do whenever I started getting lots of milk from my goats was to make soap. I have used it before and it is really good on my dry skin and I absolutely love being able to make my own stuff and know what is going into it but most of all to make my own stuff because it makes me feel a little bit closer to being self sufficient. Even though I had to order lots of stuff for it off the internet, lol. After reading up on how to make the soap I was starting to get nervous about it, it all sounded so complicated. Making sure you use seperate pans and utensils for the soap that you do not use for anything else and making sure you have on protective gear because the lye is dangerous. The lye even comes with a little warning label so that the deliverer knows it is in there. I almost decided not to try it but I am so glad I did. It took me awhile to get all the stuff I needed. I bought most of the ingredients at the grocery store. The shortening and oils and such and then I ordered the molds and lye from Hoegger's. I absolutely love that site, I order lots of stuff from there for my goats and for cheesemaking also. Back to my soap tale. After all the stuff finally arrived, I thawed out some of my pausterized milk. Yes I pasteurize it to make soap but not to drink, noone even tries to understand my mind anymore, lol. After the milk was nice and thawed and Doug was off at work and I could have some uniterrupted time I got dressed up like a lab scientist and went to work. First you stand there and slowly melt the oils which seems like forever but then once you get to the part where you are adding the 12 ounces of lye one tsp at a time to the ice cold milk you realize that you zipped along through the part with the oils. All in all though the whole process wasnt as hard as I thought it would be. I did splash some lye onto me and learned a very good lesson about being very careful but besides that there were no more mishaps. It was so amazing pouring it into the molds and realizing that I was one step closer to making all of my own products. The only thing that topped that was today when I took the soap out of the molds and saw the beautiful bars of soap. Next time I might try adding some color to them. Will just have to wait and see.