Soap Making Recipe

From LoveToKnow Crafts

Soap making is a fun, relatively easy and incredibly useful craft. You can make soap for family and friends (and for yourself) as gifts. Using different oils, fragrances, colors and additives you can make soap perfectly tailored to the individual who is going to use it.

But if you’re new to soap making, you don’t want to just go throwing things in a pot and hoping it all works out. Instead, you should find a soap making recipe or two to use a few times until you feel comfortable with the process. Then you can start experimenting with different oils and additions.

Melt and pour soap making

The most basic type of soap making doesn’t require a recipe at all. Melt and pour soap making involves taking a base soap, such as bulk glycerin or goat’s milk soap, melting it down, adding fragrance and color and putting it into a mold.

This is the closest to instant gratification that soap making gets, so if you’re in a rush (like, it’s two days before Christmas and you need a bunch of gifts NOW) this is the kind of soap to make.

If you’re making a small batch of soap, you can melt the base soap in a microwave-safe dish (a Pyrex measuring cup is great for this, just make sure you never use it for food again after you’ve used it for crafting). For a bigger batch, a double boiler on the stove works well, just put water in the bottom, soap base in the top and heat on medium, stirring occasionally to help the base melt.

If using the microwave, cover the top of your dish with plastic wrap, and use a lid on the double boiler. You don’t want the extra liquid to evaporate out of your soap.

Once the base is melted, add a few drops of fragrance oil. Use essential oils or high-quality fragrance oils for this. A little goes a long way, so start small and keep good records about how much fragrance you liked in a batch and how much was too much.

At this time you can also add color. You can use food coloring in soap, but if you use too much it can stain your clothes. Dye made especially for soap making is also available in some craft stores, specialty stores devoted to soap making, and through Internet supplies such as Soap Wizards.

When your color and fragrance have been combined with the base, simply pour in molds. If you have a lot of bubbles forming, spray the top of the poured soap with rubbing alcohol. Allow the soaps to harden for a couple of days before using.

Cold process soap making recipe

The more complicated way of making your own soap at home is known as cold process soap making. It’s not really cold, there is heat involved.

There are probably more recipes out there for cold process soap making than any other variety. It’s a great way to make soaps that are totally individual, using just the kinds of oils, fragrance, color and other additives that you want. If you have really dry skin, try an olive oil soap. If you have sensitive skin, find a recipe with oatmeal. Learn about aromatherapy and add lavender to relax you, rosemary to give you confidence or sandalwood to calm your irritability and make you feel happier.

Before you start mixing your own recipes, though, it helps to have a grounding in how making soap works. So hunt around the Internet for recipes that you want to try and make a couple of those before you decide to exchange hemp oil for olive oil or add castor oil instead of palm oil.

As mentioned in the article Soap Making Supplies, soap is basically a combination of oil, fat, usually lye and water. Of course there are a ton of variations and additions even with that small number of ingredients.

Basically, whatever the recipe, you mix the lye and distilled water, being careful not to get any on you or to inhale the fumes. At the same time, melt your oils and fats together. The lye will need to cool and the oil mixture to warm to about 110 degrees. Both mixtures need to be within five degrees of each other and near 110 degrees when they are combined.

Always add the lye mixture to the oil mixture, not the other way around. Then stir vigorously until “trace” occurs, which is when the soap that falls off your spoon kind of dents the surface and it has the consistency of thin pudding. This can take an hour or more using a spoon. You can also do this with a stick blender and it will happen in about five minutes. Then add your oil and fragrance as described above, mold and allow to cure for the specified time before using (up to eight weeks).

Hot process soap making

Hot process is a different kind of soap making where you basically add all the ingredients to a pot or double boiler (you can even do it in the oven) and stir occasionally as the soap goes through different stages. It is considered an advanced technique, and you’d probably be happy your whole life if you didn’t try it. But if you really want to know how to do it, look at this tutorial from Teach Soap.