Back at it

[FireMaker]

Made two batches of bearfat soap yesterday, 3 sweetgrass today, and 1 lavender today. Need to get busy, been putting it off.

[safety-man]

Can anyone tell me how to make my own soap?

[CarolAnn]

There are lots of recipes, and several techniques, all yielding a different end product.

Here is a good site that explains some of the basic techniques and recipes.

http://www.teachsoap.com/soapmakingmethods.html

Basically, it's a mixute of lye and fat cooked together to create a bar that will yield soap suds. It's all the other stuff that goes into it that will make it something nice to use and not so hard on the skin as the old fashioned lye soap was!

[MullersLaneFarm]

You can make a perfectly good bar of soap using commercial lye and the same oils that were available 100 years ago (lard, coconut, olive).

It is the amount of lye that you use to the amount of oils you are using that makes a homemade bar of soap different than those of old.

MMS has a wonderful lye calculator www.thesage.com

Always recalculate every soap recipe you want to use with a reputable lye calculator.
Use an accurate scale that can weigh at least .2 oz
Wear eye protection when working with lye if you value your eye sight