Over a year ago, I tried making liquid "castile" soap and utterly failed. Why? Probably because I did not follow the directions. I did not want to give up a crock pot, so I tried to do it my way on the stove top. Big mistake! So, here I am again, now that my gallon of Dr. Bronner's is down to the last 16 oz, with a surrendered crock pot and a recipe I made with the soap calculator, so I could use up various bits of my soaping oil stash and the basics are rolled from the original blog post that started this challenge.
I used Silver Firs Farm's basics to make my own recipe. Also, as I said, you must surrender a crock pot for only liquid soap making, since you are using potash (also known as KOH or potassium hydroxide). If everything doesn't go as she says ( have no idea how she says it will be done in 3-4 hours...), be patient. It took from the start, 90+ minutes to get it thick, even with my hand blender, off and on, so I didn't burn the motor up. Then I needed to stir until extremely thick, which was again, on and off for an hour or so, then I stirred every 20-30 minutes on low for 4 hours, then turned it back up to high until bed time, which was 6 hours, stirring every 15 minutes, then turned it off until we got back up this morning and stirred every 15-20 minutes on high for 4 hours. It is finally done! I added the boiling water straight to the crock pot instead of needing to clean another thing. Now I just have to wait until it is dissolved to bottle it in a recycled apple cider jug and cure it for the next 4 weeks. After that, I plan on giving each member of the family their own personal bottle with a scent they want. I will use .5 oz per 16 oz of soap, in case anyone is wondering. I get soap scents from EBay and MMS.
I used Silver Firs Farm's basics to make my own recipe. Also, as I said, you must surrender a crock pot for only liquid soap making, since you are using potash (also known as KOH or potassium hydroxide). If everything doesn't go as she says ( have no idea how she says it will be done in 3-4 hours...), be patient. It took from the start, 90+ minutes to get it thick, even with my hand blender, off and on, so I didn't burn the motor up. Then I needed to stir until extremely thick, which was again, on and off for an hour or so, then I stirred every 20-30 minutes on low for 4 hours, then turned it back up to high until bed time, which was 6 hours, stirring every 15 minutes, then turned it off until we got back up this morning and stirred every 15-20 minutes on high for 4 hours. It is finally done! I added the boiling water straight to the crock pot instead of needing to clean another thing. Now I just have to wait until it is dissolved to bottle it in a recycled apple cider jug and cure it for the next 4 weeks. After that, I plan on giving each member of the family their own personal bottle with a scent they want. I will use .5 oz per 16 oz of soap, in case anyone is wondering. I get soap scents from EBay and MMS.
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| Dissolving... |
Now that it has been a few days, I thought I would say; do not use my recipe unless you want a really thick gel type soap. I did not know until today, that if you use solid at room temperature oils, you will not have a finished liquid product, so the coconut and palm oil made an extremely thick gel. I really hope that it works well for us. I will try to remember to update once we start using it.
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