My First Batch of Soap....????

Ok so I made my first batch of soap this afternoon and wow how stressful was that!! Like I mentioned in my last post, for my first attempt I chose to make a goat milk castile soap. So that's an olive oil and goat's milk soap. Using milk in soaps is apparently very tricky as there is an added reaction with the milk and the LYE which turns the lye solution yellow/orange and it makes the solution really hot.

Thankfully i had watched a million and one videos on youtube about making goat's milk soap. I added the lye to the milk and the water very slowly and yep what a surprise it almost instantly started turning yellow.

I should have taken a photo at this stage for me as well as for you but as I'm sure you can appreciate I was a little stressed at this stage as my lye mixture was turning more and more yellow bordering on orange and the temperature was way up near 180f. So I put my lye solution in an ice bath as I had seen done on you tube and it did bring the temperature done quite quickly but I don't know if it helped with the colour at all.

I don't think the solution turned bright orange but it was definitely on the orange scale of colours. I thought what the hey it didn't say anything bad would happen to the soap if it went a bit orange in fact it said that it probably would and if it curdled to blast it with a stick blender. Luckily I bought one this morning...how glad was I! I nearly didn't buy it coz i was feeling tight this morning and didn't want to spend anymore money after buying a 14 euro chicken!

So when my oil and beeswax and my lye solution were within a couple of degrees of each other 125degrees about I poured my lye solution into my oil then got to it with the stick blender. It didn't take to long to reach "trace" this is when you lift out your blender or spoon and dribble a bit on the surface it leaves a...yep you've guessed it trace. Trace is like the consistency of custard...hmmm custard.

I have a number of friends and family that suffer with eczema and I wanted to make a soap for them so once I had reached trace I poured roughly half the mixture into the moulds before I added some essential oils to the remaining half.

I used bergamot and cedar wood essential oils both of which are supposed to be good for the treatment of skin irritations. As you can see from the picture my soap turned out a kind of a honey colour it started to curdle a little bit but My ole mate the stck blender soon sorted that out.

So as far as I am aware I think I have just made my first successful batch of Goat's Milk Castile soap but we won't really know for 4 weeks. I think I'll get me some PH strips tomorrow.

Virgin soap

I am sooooo excited about tomorrow!! My husband has gone away for the weekend to a school reunion (snore snore) and I am going to take this opportunity to make my first ever batch of soap! I didn't think my delivery of ingredients was going to get here in time but to my joy it was here when I got home from work. YAY.

I am going to make an olive oil soap, they call these "castile" soaps. But I have the fear. The recipe I have chosen is from a book by Melinda Coss and it sounds yummy, in fact i have chosen it because i have many friends that suffer with really bad eczema. I have heard that goat's milk soaps are really good for eczema sufferers. But I have also heard that milk soaps are notoriously difficult to master.

So am I getting out of my pram a little bit here or am i worrying for nothing? All the you tube videos I have watched say you should freeze the milk, but the recipe I have calls to heat it up agghhhhh!!!! Its not a pure milk soap so perhaps the fact that the liquid content is half milk half water changes things.

I will try and take some photos as I go along tomorrow and post them tomorrow evening then once I have had a few goes I might even try and make a video of my own.

So watch this space...I'm popping my soap cherry tomorrow.