Making Homemade Soap

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. If you're interested in learning how to make your own handmade soap, I've got my friend Marcy here, and we've got a treat for you. Stay tuned. Hey, as promised, we're going to learn today how to make handmade, handcrafted soap with my friend Marcy Hansen from Milk Creek Valley Farm in northern Utah. I met her at a craft show, and the product was absolutely appealing. So I started buying your product. I've become a soap snob, just because of your influence on us. So I'm going to turn over the time to Marcy here. Marcy's going to show us step-by-step how to craft your own soap. Marcy, have a blast. Thank you for that introduction. All right, so Milk Creek Valley Farm is the name of my company, and we produce soaps, handcrafted soaps. To start out the process, we have water into which we add lye. A chemical reaction occurs, and it gets heated up. Please remember to always use a stainless steel container when working with lye. You'll want to wear gloves while you do this. Also, some safety glasses. I have done this previous, so we've let it cool down. Basically, we put the lye into the water, swish it around just a little bit. There will be caustic fumes that come off of the chemical reaction, so I do advise that you do this in a very well-ventilated area or just take it outside. You'll have some fumes that you can actually see, steam light, and you're safe to bring it back inside when you have no fumes. I'll start that, usually, and then come inside and begin measuring of my oils. Now, you can use soft oils, hard oils, just depending on the type of soap that you would like. I'll take my hard oils, and I will put them in the microwave and melt them a bit, or you can use a slow cooker at a low temp and melt them all together. It just takes a little bit more planning. Now, you can use all types of oils in your soap. I choose to use all vegetable oils, and some of them are liquid, like olive oil, apricot kernel oil. Those types are liquid, and then you'll get some that are like palm and palm kernel that will add a hardness level to your soap that you can also add, and you can use animal fats as well. Right now, I'm going to get ready to pour my solution into my oils, and remember the solution is the lye and water solution. So, I'm going to put my gloves on, my glasses, my safety glasses on, because if you get any of the lye onto your skin or your eyes, you will want to rinse that out immediately. Eyes, it will burn. You have to flush those with water. You can use a little bit of vinegar on your skin or water, of course. We'll go ahead and pour this in. I'm going to go ahead and place my pan in the sink. All right, now you can see that the chemical process has already started. We have the lye down at the bottom, and then the oils that are sitting on top. So, you can see that right there. We use a stick blender, and again, you will want to make sure that you don't have any aluminum on your stick blender. Just make sure you either have stainless steel or plastic. So, you'll place this in. Give it just a couple of quick bursts, and if you'll notice, I'm just going in a figure eight motion. We want to get it to a point where we get it to trace. When you can see that on top of your mixture in the bowl, okay, it leaves a trace that it's dripped. Then, we're going to add colorant and any type of fragrance that you may want to add at that point. So, I'm going to continue mixing until we get it to trace, then we'll show you what that looks like. On top there, that's the beginning of trace. I'm going to go ahead and pour the essential oils in here. See that they'll just sit on top, and I'm just going to take my stick blender in, mix them just a little bit to kind of distribute it. For a shot of what trace looks like, you can see that it leaves a trace that it's been pulled out and that it's in there. So, that's basically what you're looking for when I talk about trace. The chemical reaction that we're looking for is called saponification. It's the making of soap, okay. The thing that sometimes can be forgotten is that if you pour this down your drain before the chemical reaction occurs, you've got all of this oil in your drain system. You could potentially clog your drains, okay. So, I'm going to actually pull up one of our molds. Now, our molds, we use a high density plastic. I also have old molds that are wood. If you were to line that, you could use your 9 by 13 baking dish. So, there's a lot of different vessels that you can use to allow your soap to saponify, okay. So, or to use as molds, okay. So, now that I have this ready to be poured, and you can tell if you take a peek at it right now, it's very, it's setting up. This particular soap that we make does not have any color, but again, like I said before, you would want to add your color at this point. Let me go ahead and pour this in. So, I'm just going to smooth things out here. I'm going to smooth things out, and then this is the point where you can add things to the top of your soaps, like poppy seeds, or lavender seeds, any of those. I choose to just do a little bit of a swirl, which if I were to have colors in here, would nicely swirl my colors. So, at this point, you want to cover your product, because you have about 24 to 48 hours. It's usually 24 hours that the saponification process occurs. What will happen is a chemical reaction in which your mixture will come to a higher temperature, and then slowly cool down. I'm going to give you guys a little look at some soap that I made yesterday, so you can see it from the pour to what it looks like 24 hours later. You'll notice I've removed one of the walls, and we have three different colors in this soap. Now, we can cut our soap. Typically, just use a dough knife for cutting. So, we'll go through and we'll slice, depending on what size of bars that you would like. These are our bars after they've been cut and stamped. These are our bars after the edges have been taken smooth and stamped. There's different things you can do with your soap. And then, lastly, this is an unstamped piece that just would be more indicative of what it would look like after just cutting. Thank you for joining us today. That concludes our Soap Making 101. We hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoy making soap. You can also, if you're interested in our products, you can find us at millcreekvalleyfarm.com.