Making soap and body butter

Today I finally made more soap. I haven't made soap since before the beginning of December last year, so my month-long hiatus made me a little rusty while I was preparing the ingredients. Unfortunately, I wanted to get some pictures while I was making the soap, but I didn't want to make any mistakes. So, you'll just have to be content with a picture of my "soap-making basket." It's a crate full of most of the things I use to make cold process soap.

Just a note before we get to the pictures. I decided on making cold process soap because I belong to this chicken forum, and the soapmakers on that forum mostly made cold process soap to sell and gift to friends and family. Some of them did use melt and pour (M&P) soaps to add a bit of "pizzazz" to cold process creations, but many of them avoided M&P because of the ingredients. Anyway, I have lots of fun making cold process soap even though the clean-up does get hairy at times. I wasn't very interested in handling lye, at first, because of the dangers, but after making soap once I was hooked. 

My soap-making basket, full of soaping supplies.

On the left is a big tub of shea butter (3 lbs) which I received in the mail yesterday. The front bag is full of palm kernel oil flakes. There's a digital scale somewhere in there, and the bottom left jug, which is almost empty, was full of extra virgin olive oil. A plastic measuring cup which I found at Goodwill holds several plastic spoons. On the far right is a box with my stick blender in it. I keep it in the box so the cord doesn't get tangled. I just like my things organized.

Smells so good and melts right on contact with skin.

This stuff is awesome! If you like flowery scents or gardenia in particular, you would love this butter blend. It's scented with the tiare flower, which is Tahiti's national flower. This 1 lb. tub is expensive but it is so worth it. I just made some shea and monoi body butter, which was very easy and satisfying to make! 4 oz. fit right into my recycled jam jar.

It won't look like this when I decide to sell it, since I want to order some metal tins. I was also playing around with the labeling. I think I'm just going to make a big label with the name on it for the front, and then leave out the "See back label..." bit. Also, I think I whipped this first batch a little too much. I only made a 4 oz. batch just to experiment, but next time I'm going to whip right up BEFORE it gets to the "butter clump" stage. Since I've made whipped cream before, I know the different stages to take my body butter. If you've never made whipped cream before and you want to attempt to make body butter yourself, you can do yourself a favor by watching the whipped stages carefully. At one point you'll see soft peaks, then as you continue to whip you'll see stiff peaks. This is where I would stop whipping the body butter (and where I would stop whipping the whipped cream!). Past that and it will get clumpy, as mine did. But it's still very usable and it works wonders! My skin is so soft yet not greasy!

The last couple of times I have gone to the natural foods store, I always snuck to the lotions aisle so I could get a little bit of shea body butter from the tester jar. Their body butter is a bit greasier and the smell is "natural," since they use shea butter and honey. I would probably use honey somewhere along the line, but the addition of cornstarch to my body butter makes it silky and not so oily on application. I actually LOVE mine more than the store's!

The best part about making this small portion of body butter is that I also got to practice making proper INCI labels. Body butter falls under a cosmetic, so I need to make sure that I put the INCI names of the ingredients on the label. Unlike my soaps' ingredients labels, this body butter's ingredients label looks very full and scientific!

I will probably update this post so I can show you a picture of my soap in the new soap mold. Then, tomorrow, I'll do another update in a new post so you can see the soap bars out of the mold. Right now, the soap is under a huge pile of blankets to keep it hot.

**If you've been following this blog, you might have noticed that the name changed from "Becoming SS (Self Sufficient)" to "Becoming Homesteaders." Ultimately, our goal is to become homesteaders, not completely self-sufficient. After all, if I continue my soap-making endeavors I will need ingredients from the outside world that I just can't produce on the farm (such as shea butter or coconut oil). I think our dream is more in line with "homesteading" than self-sufficiency, though a great amount of self-reliance is going to come into play anyway.**