After reading another home educating family's blog about how easy making soap is I thought we could give it a try. We have a couple of family birthdays this month and 'homemade soap' would be a sweet present.
After reading about it - I realised the hardest part of making soap in the UK is actually sourcing the materials. Anyway here is what you need........vegetable glycerin (we purchased the one suitable for sensitive skins) Natural colurant and perfume suitable for soapmaking - optional depending on how you want your finished soap to be. Some sort of mould for it - I did get a soap mould as they are for gifts, I thought they might be more likely to use it if it was standard soap size, but I also like the idea of using funny shaped ice cube trays.
Decide how much of the vegetable glycerin you think you need. This is definitely trial and error. Chop it up into pieces and melt it. (it takes a while on the hob, so we put it in the microwave!)
Once melted stir in the perfume and colour (again trial and error to see how strong a scent you want and how strong a colour).
I like this idea. I tried making some once, and added Sodium laureth sulfate which is inexpensive and makes the soap foam, but it can be irritating to sensitive skins, so making one without is ideal.
ReplyDeleteHow did it turn out?
Yeah I need it to be really gentle as N has eczema. I think it turned out quite well for a first go, it is a case of learning as you go along with things like that. I don't think N was overly impressed with the result she is quite fussy about the smell of things!
ReplyDeleteLOL...oh well, sometimes it's good to be fussy. Especially when it's soap, you don't want to be walking around smelling odd do you? =P
ReplyDeleteWhat did you use to colour it with?
We used soap making colourant from www.justasoap.co.uk.
ReplyDelete