I made soap .......

Finally I plucked up the courage to have a go.

I have been reading all the posts about people making their own soap and I read The Soap Teacher's blog http://soapteacher.blogspot.com/2010/10/basic-cold-processed-soap.html, but I have been afraid of having a go, until this week.......

I shopped around for the caustic soda - I finally found some Caustic soda pearls for 4€ in Auchan and I bought a litre of Olive Oil, so I was ready to go.

When I told MOH what I was planning to do, I got all the shock horror stories - be careful, it's dangerous, you do not want to touch that sort of thing etc. I explained that I had read lots of blogs where people had done it very successfully and if you followed the safety precautions it was not dangerous.

When I talked to my youngest son, he was really interested and talked about experiments he had been doing in physics.

Yesterday afternoon I decided it was time. I prepared my kitchen, got everything ready, weighed out all the ingredients and washed my molds.

My son D said he wanted to do it, in fact he was insistent that he wanted to do it all, so who am I to argue!

 We kitted him out in the required Safety Equipment.

We could not find the proper googles so we used the face screen that came with the strimmer. 

We went outside to mix the caustic soda with the water, just to be on the safe side, then back into the house to add it to the oil.

Max was hanging about just in case there may be some food that fell in the floor.

Then the stick whisk to get it to the right consistency.

In the middle of all this we had a major incident with a snake and the dogs, but that is for another post.

I used a ladle to get the custard like mixure into the molds.

I think I should have leveled them, but maybe I can do that when they are hard.

I took the tray upstairs and wrapped it up to keep it warm.

 

When I checked it this morning all the soap was hard, so I turned it out of the molds and it is now sitting somewhere cool and airy to harden for 4 weeks.

I will let you know how it gets on.