Soap for Sale!

I have been making my own bath soap for a couple of years now. I started doing it because something about the process spoke to me on a cellular level. The main activity in cold process soap making is the stirring. First you mix together water and lye, then wait for it to cool down. It will be extremely hot, and it stinks. While that's cooling, you weigh out your oils and put them in the pan. When the lye and water is almost cooled to the temperature you like, you heat up your oils. They have to be the same temperature at the same time. Then, you mix them together and stir.

The stirring part is what I like. It's calming to me. Stirring, and watching the mixture slowly turn grainy, then eventually solidify. Once it's the consistency of a smooth oatmeal, you can add in your scents or, any other ingredients. I've used essential oils before, but my latest creations are scented with dried flowers. They scent the bars and make a pretty bar of soap.

My most recent favorite is calendula.

I have some up on eBay right now. Here's the link. Please try it. I'd love to be able to make some more but right now I am overflowing with soap! If you prefer not to fool around with eBay, but still want to buy some, e-mail me at momsoap@gmail.com and we can work something out.

Thanks for reading. I love writing this blog. I hope you like reading it. Happy Wednesday.

The soothing stirring of homemade soap and sour cream sauce

My love of soap making began when I started making homemade chicken (sometimes spinach mushroom) enchiladas with sour cream sauce.

This may come as a surprise to those who know me best and know that my favorite movie is Fight Club. But my desire to learn how to make soap did not come from Tyler Durden, although, I do think it would be super awesome to sell rich women's fat asses back to them in the form of cosmetic soap.

But really, I love to make soap because I love to stir. Soapmaking is about four percent ingredients and about and hour or two of stirring. I figure I must have been a witch in a former life (shut up Toyin) because I feel so very at home standing over a simmering pot.

This is not something I figured out early on in life. It actually took many years of stirring that sauce to realize how much I loved it.

My first go around with making those enchiladas with sour cream sauce ended up with way over-spiced enchiladas; a huge fight with my new (now ex) husband; tears; a night out at a bar drinking with a strange man; and watching a middle-aged Japanese woman shoot a cut up banana out of her twat. But that's a story for another day.

The enchiladas got eaten. My husband and I made up, and eventually got divorced, but not before I continued making those damn enchiladas and stirring the sauce. And stirring it. And stirring it.

Then one day, years after that first time I made enchiladas, I was cooking them for a small dinner party and chatting with my best friend on the phone. It was likely that I was in a mellow state of mind at the time, which was pretty common for me after I got divorced and before I had a child. As I stood over the lovely mixture of sour cream, corn starch, spices and chicken broth I said to her, "Damn, I love to make sauce."

I don't know when I had realized it, but I did. I loved making that sauce. There was something so very soothing about watching the mixture glob together, become clumpy and then eventually smooth out. All I had to do was stand there, stare at it, and stir it.

I haven't made those enchiladas in a long time. Toyin is lactose intolerant so I never made them while we were living together. But I started learning how to make soap.

I made some soap last week. And don't you know, ever since I've had a craving for those damn enchiladas.