My soap making process
First - Clean the kitchen! I’m adventurous, but I’m not immune to lye burns and certainly do not want any flakes accidentally landing where they don’t belong. I gather all my oils, butters, essential oils, molds, and tools and cover the counters with paper to contain any rogue ingredients. This is usually when my husband reminds me to make sure I’m not wearing my good clothes and to be careful with the lye. He is a miracle worker when it comes to getting out stains and even stitching me up, but there is only so much he can do. I keep him on his toes.
I then measure out all of my oils and butters into a large stock pot and melt them on the stove. While they are melting down, I prepare my lye solution with either distilled water, beer, tea, juice, wine, milk, or some other concoction I’ve dreamed up.
As I wait for my fats and lye solution to cool down to my preferred working temp, I sanitize all my tools, decide which molds I’ll be using, prepare my colorants, and create my essential oil blends.
Now for the fun part! Time to pour the lye into the oils and watch the saponification process begin. It’s really cool to watch the color and viscosity change. I stick blend until I reach my desired trace for the batch, portion out what I need for any colors I’m using, and mix in any essential oils. When all of my soap batters are ready, I pour, layer, and swirl to my heart’s content.
After all batches are mixed, colored, poured, and swirled, it’s time to clean up. My husband likes to joke that a bomb has gone off or a tornado whirled through our kitchen. But it is just soap after all! In one swoop the paper-lined counters are picked up, sprayed and wiped down. I give a good rinse of soap mixing container, stick blender, spoons, and spatulas before putting them in the dishwasher otherwise we’d have a foam party in our kitchen…which is not an easy cleanup. I put all my ingredients away and eagerly await unmolding my soap!
Despite my years of practice, not every batch turns out to be a visually appealing marketable product. Since it pains me to waste materials or throw out a perfectly good product, I will rebatch, reimagine, or grate it down for decorating another batch. When my efforts fail, the rejects go into the ‘home use’ soap bin. Nothing is wasted.