Soap Kitchen!

We are really grateful to have our own soap kitchen! Thanks to Joel at Adirondack Joe  
for retro-fitting our basement, we now have an area devoted to just making soap. It is so nice not to have all these soap making supplies cluttering up your food kitchen! Speaking of food, Carson will be at culinary school this fall in Charlotte. Maybe that's why her soap recipes have something to do with food... One of our most nourishing bars is her Pumpkin Bar. Made with Pumpkin Seed Oil and Pumpkin Butter. Anyway, here's a peek at our Soap Kitchen:

Those are a couple of just poured soaps on the work table. Our Big Bamboo Bar & a test run of a Beach Bar we've been working on. With Aloe, Coconut, Lime & Sea Salt. We also threw in some dried lime peel. 


Here's the quote for the day: 
"Soap and water and common sense are the best disinfectants." 
~William Osler

   

Soap Facts...

The making of soap is actually just Chemistry 101. Soap is a cleansing agent made from the chemical reaction of oils and fats with an alkali [sodium hydroxide- also known as lye] to produce a solid bar of soap. Soap cannot be made without using lye. When made correctly, no lye will remain in the bar of glycerin rich soap. 

                             *Here are some saturated fats such as coconut 

                                           oil,  palm oil, cocoa butter & shea butter.

                                   **Some unsaturated fats include

                                                    olive, castor, sunflower oils.

Once the fats are mixed with the lye, a chemical reaction begins to happen.   This is called saponification. - the chemical reaction that makes soap. This chemical reaction gives off heat- so much that the soap mixture will retain enough heat to create what's called a "gel stage." The soap mixture will get so hot that it almost liquefies and turns translucent. It really does look like a gel.

                                               ***This is some soap in one of our molds
                                                during the gel stage.




Some soap mixtures get hotter than others. If your recipe includes alcohol or sugar, it can overheat. This is something we've found out the hard way. We used beer and put honey in all our first soap batches. We've learned alot about making soap over the last few months. We continue to work on getting our recipes just right and testing them out on ourselves, family members and gullible friends.  

This is just a brief summary of some soap facts we've gathered so far. Oh- and the handmade soaps like the soap we make contains natural glycerin. The commercially produced soap has had the glycerin removed and used or sold elsewhere! That is one of the reasons why handmade soap is so good for your skin. The extra glycerin helps retain moisture.   

Thanks for your interest and we'll keep you posted on our progress. Smell you later! 

We Love Soap!

We love hand made soap and took a soap making class earlier this year. We have to thank Kate over at Greenstone Soap for sharing her vast knowledge with us and the other ladies in the class. We had so much fun we decided to try making soap at home. So, armed with our new how-to book and a few ingredients like Coconut Oil, Palm Oil, Olive Oil, Lye and some essential oils, we made our first three batches.  Hannah works in the beer & wine industry and wanted to try making soap with beer. It is a little more difficult to make with beer due to the alcohol and sugar content but we felt confident! (We even threw in some honey on top of all that!) So we put on our rubber gloves and got to work.

We made a batch with Atlanta Brewery Sweetwater 420 Ale, a batch with lemongrass & dried lemon peel and a batch with tea tree & lavender with lavender buds sprinkled on top. 
We only had one battery charged stick blender to mix these three batches. We didn't realize that you really need one with a plug for some turbo mixing such as this! For our last batch, we wound up mixing it with one of Carson's vintage hand mixers:

LOL! It took forever to get a trace on that batch. But all three batches turned out surprisingly nice! We just attributed it to the fact that soap making must be really easy, right? Well... as it turned out- those great first three batches must have been from dumb luck. But after that day we were hooked. One thing we all agreed on: soap making was really fun. It's been really FUN coming up with different recipes and putting whatever you want in a batch of soap and testing it out. It has also been really fun doing something together. We are all busy ladies and it is so nice to just hang out on a Sunday with my daughters, sipping champagne & making soap! 

So many of our batches look like food!

This is our lemon bar with the lemon peel. It looks like fudge! We are in the process of mixing & testing new recipes and making them available to the public. For now we are using family and friends as guinea pigs to test soap samples. We will keep you posted.


Thanks & have a clean day!