How to Make Calendula Soap 🌼 a cold process calendula soap recipe

Let's make some beautiful calendula flower soap. This is a cold process soap recipe that uses from scratch natural ingredients. It makes about 10 bars of golden colored soap speckled with small pieces of calendula petals. I'll take you through each soap making step from start to finish. I'm Tanya Anderson from Lovely Greens and you will always find calendula growing in my garden. I've been growing and using it in handmade soap and skincare for almost 15 years and I not only use it in soap making but I use it in creams and lotions, bath fizzies, lip balms, you name it. Calendula is renowned for its skin healing properties. In soap making we mainly use calendula flowers as a natural soap colorant and using them gives soap this beautiful golden color or in the very least the speckles of color if you use the petals in the soap batter. And I'm going to show you how to make this particular recipe. Now with soap making and starting off this calendula flower soap recipe we begin by sourcing our ingredients and that first one is of course calendula flowers. You can use fresh or dried flowers for this recipe and if you're using fresh you're going to want to pick enough to make four tablespoons of fresh flowers. If you're using dried you'll need half of that you'll only need two tablespoons of dried calendula flowers. The other thing is that these flowers here these are kind of a yellow a golden yellow color. These will make a beautiful soap but it's the orange type that will give you a really vivid color. Cold processed soap making combines pure oils and sodium hydroxide which is a type of lye. You mix them together in a very precise way and while you're making the soap the lye breaks the oils apart on a molecular level. I go through this process in much more detail in the natural soap making for beginners online course where I also take you through natural soap ingredients, equipment and safety, setting up your kitchen work area, and step-by-step soap making videos. There's also printables, resources, and guidance from myself. I even have a second calendula soap recipe in the course. If you want to learn a bit more I'll put a link up on the screen and you'll find that same link down in the video description. And also if you are serious about learning to make natural handmade soap taking a course like mine will get you started fast. Now let's go inside and make some calendula flower soap. After putting on gloves and goggles the next thing we're going to do is turn the oven on. So we're going to preheat it to 75 celsius and we're doing this because we're going to oven process the soap and that's going to boost the color. The first ingredients that we mix together are the lye and the distilled water. I'm working here at my sink. The window is open for ventilation. I'm just going to give this a jiggle and pour it straight in. You want to stir it immediately because otherwise the lye will form a really crusty hard layer at the bottom. Now stir until you're sure that the lye is completely dissolved and don't hang your head over the jug because there's a lot of steam coming off of it and it's not good to breathe in. There's also quite a lot of heat right now too you might be able to feel it. Now when that is all dissolved just tip in your calendula and give it another stir. This is going to extract the color and soften up those dried calendula petals but we want this to also cool down. So I've plugged the sink and I'm just going to fill it with a little bit of water. Next I'm turning my hob on to medium low. This is two of five and I'm going to put the pan of oils directly on the hob and I have a silicon spatula here. This is what I tend to use and I'm going to hold on to the pan and I'm going to move these oils around and get them just melted. You can see they're already starting to melt. We don't want this sitting on the heat for too long. We just want to melt the solid oils is all. It's just melted so I'm going to take it off the heat, turn the hob off, put it on a potholder. Now that the solid oils are melted and just look at that beautiful golden color in there. Now it's time to add the liquid oils. I've got the olive oil and castor oil in here and what I'm going to do is give it a stir. I pour the liquid oils against the spatula like this to reduce any air bubbles getting into the oil. It just helps from an aesthetic perspective. Okay let's scrape it out. Get every last drop. Okay it is now time to mix these. This is where all the magic happens and what I'm going to do is I'm going to put the spatula here in the pan. Again I'm just going to pour the liquid against the spatula. This reduces any bubbles or splashing which makes it safer as well. And my goodness that color is stunning already. I'm going to put this aside. Put this aside too and now it's time to use the immersion blender. We're just going to dip the head in at an angle and then use it as a spoon to stir it all together. And then I'm going to hold it down on the bottom of the pan, not move it around at all, and pulse. And then I'm going to stir until it's all mixed together again and then I'm going to pulse again. And it is turning this opaque color because it's emulsifying so the oils and the water are being bonded together by the action of the immersion blender and also because of the lye in there and that helps to kick start saponification. And I'm just going to be stirring and mixing long enough to get a very thin trace. It's been a minute or so and we are now at that stage where we're at a very light trace and I can see just the faintest drizzle of soap when I do this and that is a really good place to stop mixing. We've got the ramekin here of essential oil, which I'm going to just pour on the top there and stir in. And you want to stir this in really thoroughly, which is why we want to stop at a light trace because the thicker the batter gets, the more difficult it is to stir in any extras like essential oil and the more difficult it is to get it into the soap mold. While the soap batter is still fluid, we want to pour it into the mold. This is a silicone mold, a loaf mold, and I've had it for a long time. And again, I'm going to use the spatula and scrape as much of this soap batter out as possible and get it in the mold. And now what we want to do very carefully is place the soap in the oven, turn the heat off, and close the door. And we're going to leave it in here overnight and we'll come back to it tomorrow. The next day you can take the soap out of the oven. It'll be perfectly room temperature, firm, and almost ready to cut. We're just going to put it on the counter now and leave it for another day. It's now two days after I made this soap and it's now fully, well, mainly saponified. It takes 48 hours for the lye and the oils to interact for the most part. It's relatively safe to handle. I still have gloves on because I don't want fingerprints on the soap. And also there is still a chance there's a small amount of lye left. So we have a beautiful block of calendula soap and now we need to cut it into bars. To cut your block of soap into individual bars you can use a kitchen knife. Just make sure that the blade is quite thin otherwise you might not get as clean a finish. I have a soap cutter here and it has a steel wire blade and so when I put this soap block through and then cut I get a really nice clean bar of soap and they're all the same width as well so it's quite professional. And if you want to get the same soap cutter I'll leave a link down in the video description. Now that you've made your calendula soap and you cut it into bars the next step is curing it. You can't use it just yet and what you do is you take your bars and you take them inside some place that's airy that is either dark or very dim. You space your bars out and you leave them there for at least four weeks. So the time is four to six weeks that you leave them to cure, dry out and become really gentle for your skin. And at the end of that time you can use them and gift them and even sell them if you want to have soap making as a business. If you've got any questions about this recipe or anything that you've heard leave me a comment down below. And again if you really want to get started fast with learning how to make handmade soap definitely check out my natural soap making for beginners online course which you'll find more details about down in the video description. I also have a playlist of other soap making videos and skin care recipes that you can watch here on the YouTube channel. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time for another video here on Lovely Greens. Bye for now!