Oh my gosh! My weekend was so busy that I am just now getting a chance to write about my experience making soap for the first time! It was busy with a capitol B! (more about that on Tuesday) I also promised a video that I couldn’t deliver on. Ahh! I’ll do better!
I decided to start small with soap making. I only made 4 bars. It was actually quite easy! I used a melt and pour Goat’s Milk Soap Base and added honey and oats.
On Amazon Prime Day, I found a set of silicone molds for sale and snatched them up! I always wanted to give soap making a try and saw this as my opportunity! I also got a 2 pound block of soap base (not on sale, sadly).
I was super pumped to try this and my husband was about as excited as me which was fun to watch! He took the photos while I did the cooking.
I decided to start with just one pound of the soap. I wasn’t sure how many bars that would make so I was going about this as a try and see kind of thing.
I started by spraying the molds with rubbing alcohol. I reused an old mini glasses cleaner spray bottle for this. I just misted all over as if I was spraying on nonstick cooking spray!
Then I chopped up the pound soap block into one inch cubes. I cut it into three chucks and then cut those chunks into cubes. It was pretty solid so it took some pushed at first, but once it was into smaller blocks it got a lot easier.
I have a small pot that is almost too small to really be useful, and it’s very, very old. I plopped the soap cubes into the pot and put them over a stove burner on medium. I am old school and don’t have a microwave, so I do all my heating and reheating and such on the stove! I made sure to stir the whole time. They started melting really quick, which I guess made sense since it is soap – duh! I would take it off the burner every 30 seconds or soo to prevent the soap from starting to boil.
It felt to me like melting butter. You just got to keep stirring and stirring cause there is always that little piece that never wants to melt! I finally just took it off the burner and just stirred and stirred until that little sucker melted. Then it was smooth and silky.
It was at this point that I added in the honey. More like, I stirred and my over-excited husband poured in the honey. I used one tablespoon of honey for the pound of soap. Once added, it didn’t really smell like honey, so I’d recommend also adding some kind of essential oil to give the soap a nice smell. Without, it just smells like boring old soap!
You can see the soap splatters on the stovetop in the photos. It does slash around once it’s melted so watch out!
The soap was hot enough that I almost didn’t need to mix in the honey, it hit the soap and just melted right in! I did stir it around to make sure the honey was distributed throughout.
Next we added the oats. I had old fashioned oats and quick oats, but I decided to use the old fashioned oats. I thought seeing the whole oat would look nicer and would not take over the soap with little mashed up oat pieces (if I had used the quick oats). This part was very try and see. We just added 1 tablespoon of oats at a time until it looked like enough oats. After 2 tablespoons I thought it was enough, but my over-eager husband wanted more. We ended up with about 4 tablespoons of oats in the soap.
I stirred in the oats to ensure they were evenly distributed throughout the soap.
Then we started the pour! I went ahead and poured all the way to the top of each mold. The soap turned out fine this way, but it was hard to move and would spill a lot. With one pound, we ended up with four full bars of soap. In hindsight, I should have put the molds on a cookie sheet to make moving them to the fridge much easier. What ended up happening is 1) me spilling a bunch and making a mess, and 2) my husband and I taking corners of the mold and pulling tightly to keep everything level and moving sooooo slowly to the fridge to prevent more messes.
You can’t see my mess in any of these pictures (thank goodness), but there was soap spillage into the other mold openings and all over my countertops!
When we finally got the soap into the fridge, I left it there while we had dinner and even for got about it for another about two hours. It was fine and honestly really only needed maybe an hour or so.
My husband joyfully offered to use a bar first and share his thoughts!
He said he liked the exfoliation from the oats and it felt soft on his skin. He wishes there was a nicer smell and mentioned that next time we need to add some kind if scent. Then he went on to say that I should make mint extract soap. I rolled my eyes and walked away – I hate mint!
10 out of 10, would recommend you trying out soap making for yourself! I enjoy the fact that I can make my own soap, and that it is all natural and I know (and can say/read) everything that is in it!
My Urban Homestead by Sarah 