Today we are going to show you how we make our own soap! We like to incorporate our own products that we use here and grow at the farm.
CHAPTERS:
0:00 Making Hand Soap
0:31 Create Lye Solution
1:36 Combine Oils
3:00 Mix Oil with Lye Mixture
4:22 Add Scents and Flavors
7:24 Pouring Mixture Into Molds
8:41 Design Your Hand Soap
11:26 Final Product
TRANSCRIPT FROM VIDEO:
Hi, this is Laura at the Urban Farm and today I’m going to show you how we make our own soap and we like to incorporate our own products that we use here and grow at the farm.
If you think that the world is headed in a direction that makes you a bit concerned for the future and you’d like to be as self-sufficient and independent as possible, then you come to the right place. My name is Lynette Zang. Now it’s time to go Beyond Gold and Silver.
Our first step here in making the soap is to create the lye solution. The lye solution. You use a water or a liquid. You can also use milk. We like to use goat milk, but we don’t have that. So today, just the water. And this is the lye, you need to be very careful because this is a chemical and it creates a reaction when you mix it with the water.
So we’re gonna carefully mix it, make sure you’re in a well-ventilated area and not to let this touch your skin. So the lye here is what creates the lather with the soap. So we mix this up. We mix in the lye to the water, add in our candy thermometer, and the temperature’s gonna jump up to 160 degrees, and it’s going to take quite a few minutes to cool down and it’ll be ready to use and mix with all of your oils once it cools back down to 120 degrees. So we’re gonna fully mix it in here and then let it sit for a couple minutes while we mix in our oils together.
Our second step making the soap is to mix in, combine all of our oils, and we can do this while the lye mixture is cooling. I have it set in the fridge right now to cool to 120 degrees. It’s at about 140. So for our oils, we like to use olive oil. This is 30 ounces of olive oil. Just pour all into one bowl. And we use this little scale to help measure out all of our liquids in ounces.
So this is 30 ounces of olive oil, six ounces of coconut oil, and then we have two ounces of sesame oil. You could use sesame oil, almond oil, castor oil. So we mix all of our three oils together and then you can heat it up just slightly. You want the mixture of the oil and the lye to be not greater than 10 degrees difference. So once the lye is cooled, 120, 110 to 120 degrees, and we’ll heat this up to about 110 degrees and we will combine them. That will be the third step.
So our third step here is to mix our oil with the lye mixture. So this has all of our oils heated up to 110 degrees, and this is our lime mixture. And this is 120 degrees. It’s still a hot to the touch, so we’ll carefully pour it into our bowl here. Remember, it’s a chemical reaction, so you wanna make sure that this does not touch your skin at all.
So we have them together. Then we will use our emulsion blender, our little hand blender, and we’ll blend them up together until the mixture is going to thicken and then it will reach a trace. So as it thickens, it’ll leave a little trace amount on the blender. So let’s blend it up. So here this is just about done. You know, it’s about done when it’s a lot thicker. It’s kind of like pudding, and when it runs down the blender, it kind of will leave a mark as it runs down. So we’re going to go on ahead and put this into our three mixing bowls, and we’re making a couple different flavored variety scents smelling soaps.
So our fourth step is going to be adding in our scents and flavors that you would like to add to your soaps. This is a recipe for one serving size of one, which makes a couple different bars, but we’re gonna be mixing it to make three different types of flavors and sets. So this one here is going to be our lavender geranium, and this one here is going to be our chamomile lemon. And the one we’ll leave in this bowl is gonna be cinnamon.
So here’s our essential oil. And because this is a third of the recipe, this is gonna be, about point 25 ounce that will put in. You also just kind of do a smell test and smell how strong you would want it to be? That smells really good. So that’s the geranium. And then this one was going to be the lemon chamomile. We have our lemon essential oil here. Okay, well it smells pretty good and if you want it to be stronger, then you just add more drops of your essential oil. And then in this one here we’re going to use our cinnamon. And I have a cinnamon essential oil. This smells like fall. And then also, you can also add in additives to help tint the soaps. We’re gonna add a little bit of cinnamon powder. We’ll just do a little bit to start to figure out kind of how much coloration. So the final step will be pouring these in the molds and we will show you how to do that next.
All right, we have the cinnamon essential oil all mixed into our soap mixture here. So we have our little handy dandy little molds that we got. These are just little rectangles. And then in this one we decided the cinnamon to add some loofa.
This is loofa that we’ve grown here on the farm. So you just cut it to size and put it in your mold. And we’re just gonna go on ahead and pour this in. Just fill it up. Now loofa is fun to put in because it’s a good scrubber for your body. And since we have some extra, we’re going going ahead and put it in some of the plain mold as well. Okay, I’m gonna use this spoon to kind of help smooth out our mold, little liquid in the mold.
Now that we have our soap mixture in the molds, go ahead and feel free to make design on the top. We’re gonna use this paper cover half of it. I’m just gonna sprinkle on the cinnamon on half of it. Do whatever you want. You can get creative. All the extra cinnamon will just come off when you pull out the soap. Next up is our lemon chamomile. We have enough essential oil here and our soap mixture we’ll just add it to the molds. Nice creamy yellow, lemon.
Now we’re going to add on our decorative chamomile on top. And the third and final set here is a geranium. So we have it all mixed in. We’re gonna go ahead and pour into our soap mold here. Pour it in and then we smooth it out, add a little more to this one. And after we have it all smooth and poured out, we’re going to go in ahead and add in our pedals. We have a mix here of little baby roses and lavender. So after you pour your soaps into your molds, you let them sit for 24 hours overnight, and then the soap will harden.
This is one that we made two days ago. And so once it’s hardened and sat for 24 hours, you can go ahead and just pop it out and here you go. This is a plain soap. And here we have some other flavors we’ve made this last week. Some other sense, this is oatmeal honey, rosemary lavender. And this is a honey flavored soap and you just let them sit out. And so you set them out an inch apart and you can let them cure and sit for 30 days. The longer they sit, the harder that they’ll get and they won’t be so soft to the touch.
That is how we make our soap. I hope that this video inspired you and you make your own soaps and bath and body products from items that you grew yourself around your own farm or home.
This is the final product of homemade soap. This one right here is the lavender rosemary. The one with the pretty flowers is geranium. The brown one is the honey, and the one in the back is lemon lime, lavender rosemary. And the front with the oats is goat milk honey oat, the far right is the cinnamon and the bottom right there is the chamomile. So this is the final product of our soap. It took about a couple hours to make for each variety and four to six weeks to cure before it’s nice and hard.
