I love making home-made soap out of fat and lye. It's not actually a very good money saver, as soap is very cheap to buy but soap-making ingredients can get pricey. They don't have to be pricey, but when you get really tempted by the nicest-sounding essential oils and speciality fats and waxes like me it's hard to hold back.Still, I find it endlessly satisfying to make things myself. Just knowing how to make things, rather than depending on buying everything at the shops, is pleasing. Maybe I'm weird but I just don't find instant gratification all that gratifying.
So I make my own soap in batches and use it or give it away or barter it. At the moment we're using an unscented hemp-oil soap, and a few weeks ago I swapped a bar for lots of packets of veg seeds.
I wrote an article about soap-making, and the nice people at selfsufficientish.com published it here. It's got a recipe, detailed instructions, and several very fetching photos of me.
2 comments:
I'm very impressed, but being terminally accident-prone, I don't trust myself with dangerous substances sufficiently to follow your example.
I do like handmade soap a lot, though; it's one of my little extravagences. At present I'm working my way through some lovely rose-scented glycerine soaps I bought in Lerwick from the Shetland Soap Company.
Hey, that's so funny. I've only read one or two articles on selfsufficientish and that was one of them! What a small world it is.
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