If you make a 5kg batch twice a year you’ll have more than enough for your personal needs, plus probably extras to give out at holidays and whatnot. I’ll never go back to store-bought soap again.
Of course you may!
Sorry, for not getting back sooner. Yes, my lab partner and I were cooking over Bunsen burners. This was about 25 years ago so the details are fuzzy. We were heating the mixture (or whatever it was) we added something to it and it started really bubbling over and ran all down the sides of the glass thingy we were cooking it in and caught fire. The flames went all up the sides of the glass thing and looked very cool, but also scary.
The teacher put it our rather quickly with a fire extinguisher and no one was hurt. Chemistry labs were not my thing. If it hadn’t been for the tests and other written stuff I don’t think I would have passed.
Thank you kindly. Maybe the stuff you added provided nucleation sites that triggered it to boil over–do you remember if it was a powder or liquid?
At least it beats the stunt some friends of mine pulled in a high school chem lab many (many) years ago–they undertook, for reasons they never adequately explained, to heat alcohol in a beaker over a Bunsen burner. Shortly thereafter, a cascade of broken glass and boiling alcohol plunged past the flame and spread over the entire surface of the table, burning with a cheery blue glow.
At least some craft shops do. Michael’s has a small selection. In fact, the ones around here actually have a small soap-making section next to the candle-making supplies. It includes coloring agents for soap as well as scents, and bulk glycerin soap for those who just want to make custom scent/color/design bars without actually making the soap itself from scratch.
You can also buys scents online, which will almost certainly provide better selection and possibly better quality.
Making soap is so complicated and dangerous I am amazed people realized how to do it so early in history.
I suspect the real trick was figuring out “Hey, this goop from under the cooking fire is really good for cleaning stuff!” (I imagine that people originally stumbled across naturally formed soap where lye leached from wood ash mixed with animal fat drippings from cooking.)
I’m still trying to figure out how people came up with the whole ground wheat and yeast thing for making bread.
The possibly apocryphal way I’ve heard it: lye forms from ashes (post battle?), and when mixed with fat in a river, produces cleaning. After that it only took putting 2 and 2 together.
My great-grandmother always made it in a big iron pot over a fire in the backyard. Lye soap, of course. No fancy schmancy oils or whatever. I do know we saved ashes from the coal stove all year and made soap after the hog butchering.
All soap is lye soap. “Fancy schmancy oils or whatever” can be used to react with the lye; or you can use lard, or any other type of fat. Fat + lye = soap.
(Of course you can get detergents and other cleansers that weren’t made from lye, but technically those aren’t soaps.)
I make “melt and pour” soaps which are much less scarey than lye soap. Very easy too. Melt the soap base* in the microwave, add color and fragrence to the melted mixture, and pour into a mold to set up. Molds can be bought or improvised (pvc pipe, old ashtrays, homemade wooden molds, stuff found at the thrift store, etc.) I’m sure the cost is more than lye soap, but like I said, it’s safe and easy. Great for gifts. There are tons of books about soap making on ebay or amazon.
*Soap Base can be purchased at craft stores or on the internet. Most places that sell candlemaking supplies carry soapmaking supplies as well.
No clue. It was so long ago and the teacher was so mean! He was awful. Everyone thought so. He totally belittled us for making such a stupid mistake. Later in the year I burnt my hand pretty badly on a faulty Bunsen burner and he just laughed and made a joke about the smell of burning flesh. He wouldn’t even let me go to the office to get ice or anything. I had the huge blisters and my mom was so pissed. But we didn’t sue because people didn’t sue over stuff like that back in the day.