Soap Making
From LoveToKnow Crafts
Soap making is a great hobby and soap makes a wonderful gift because, let’s face it, everyone needs it!
Early Soap Making
For the Phoenicians and Babylonians, soap making was a necessity. For a lot of human history, soap has been made by individuals for family use. If you ask the thousands of crafters who still make soap, they’ll tell you that’s the way it should be.
Like many great inventions, soap was probably discovered by accident. The main ingredients in the original formulations of soap were animal fat and ashes. Ancient man likely discovered soap when the fat drippings and ash left in the fire pit got wet and made foam.
The person washing up the pots might have noticed that when ashes got into the cooking vessel and combined with the animal fat, that foamy stuff actually made it easier to wash the pan.
Over time, people learned that ashes and fat were the key ingredients to soap. However, no one really understood how or why soap making worked for many centuries.
We know for sure that the Romans made soap because of the accounts of Pliny and the existence of a soap making factory in Pompeii. Through the influence of the Romans, the Celts also began to use soap. In that way, soap making slowly spread around the world.
Soap in the Colonies
When the first settlers moved to America, they took a lot of soap with them and asked for soap when new colonists were set to arrive. Eventually, however, they found that clearing land for farming left them lots of ashes and slaughtering animals for food left waste fat, so they could easily make their own soap.
At this time, soap making was still very much trial and error, as no one really understood the science behind it. But in the colonies, professional soap makers took over much of the trade, from producing the potash (the ash component) to making and selling soap.
Because potash and its cousin pearlash were very valuable, the colonies and later America produced a lot of these materials to trade with Europe. Of course, this decimated the American tree population by the end of the 18th century.
The development of sodium hydroxide (aka caustic soda or lye) made the process of soap making much easier, cheaper and less environmentally damaging.
How Soap Is Made
Soap is basically a chemical reaction caused by the combination of sodium hydroxide and fat, which traditionally came from animals but now is often replaced with vegetable, fruit or nut oils.
The lye is mixed with water while the fats are heated. When the two mixtures have reached about the same temperature (usually around 110 degrees F) the two are combined by adding the lye to the fat. Then, you stir or use an immersion blender until the soap gets to the right consistency to mold and cure.
Learn More
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