Make Your Own Soap

The first Friday of everymonth is Diva's Night for our homeschooling moms here at The Meetinghouse. It is a chance for all of us to get together without our children or husbands and have some fun. Everyone brings some food and drinks and sometimes we go out. Lately, we've been gathering in our homeschool space and finding creative things to do. Last night, Danielle showed us how to make homemade soap. We all have been wanting to learn how to do this and Diva Danielle was a fabulous teacher.

This is Danielle. We love her Tie-dye shirt. Yes she made it.

Rachael wanted to wear her hazmat gear while handling the lye.

Danielle unloaded all of her equipment.

Everyone brings food. Rachael made this really yummy colon shaped spinach and cheese stromboli thing. Next time she's going to attempt the letter "S". It really was delicious.

There was a pasta salad with sun dried tomato dressing, roasted red pepper hummus, Spinach salad, Antipasto, broccoli quiche and chips and Linda brought some decadent dessert from the bakery. See the drink at the far end of the table? Sue made frozen mojitos. We made fun of her all night because it looked like a heath food drink or maybe some spirolina.

Danielle got busy demonstrating the soap making. She had buckets of palm oil and coconut oil.

Rachael needed to read the instructions. She was in all the AP classes in highschool.

Danielle just wanted us to be quiet and listen and hid for a bit.

This smelled so yummy like olive oil.

The coconut base was added to the oil everything was slowly melted.

Danielle greased her soap box with the Crisco, not with the bottle of Merlot next to her.

Linda thought the soap box smelled delicious.

She demonstrated the lye that everyone was so afraid of. If she had stopped playing Vanna White and moving around so much I would have been able to get a better picture.

Instead of water, Danielle made a base of green tea for the soap. It smelled so good. Here she is adding the lye to the green tea.

It turned it a really funky (used diaper) brown color.

She stirred and stirred and the mixture got really hot. While the oil base and tea mixture cooled, we all headed outside for some talk and ahem...tea.

We all sat around the pond and watched my Koi fish swim. Sue is still working on the Spirolina drink. I gave her a bendy straw to drink with. We had plenty in our craft supply box.

When the tea mixture was cooled enough, it was poured into the oil base.

And we all stood around and cracked jokes while Danielle worked.

She used her immersion blender until the concoction reached trace, or until the mixture left an imprint on the top of the mixture.

Then Danielle poured everthing into the mold. It looked like chocolate cake batter.

See? All Done.

The soap started to make this swirly pattern as it settled and Danielle put the top on to maintain the heat for a bit.

And Voila! We were done. Well not really. Danielle told us that the soap had to sit for 48 hours before we could do anything with it. I peeked on it this morning and it was a much lighter brown color with pretty swirls. Danielle is going to send us all the measurements and websites so that we can all try this ourselves. I'll post the recipe and such another time.

Lots of fun for a mom's night out.