Handmade soap making lets you combine ingredients and then watch something entirely different form right before your ideas. Making soap is a great hobby enjoyed by many. Here are the basics for making soap yourself.
1 . The recipe.
Critical to soap making is the right blend of ingredients. Soap is a combination of fats, water an lye. In the right proportions you get very mild soap that's lathers well and feels like luxury. The wrong proportions and you get a real mess.
Choose a recipe from someone you trust to start. It need not have a whole list of ingredients. Coconut, palm and olive oils are the basic oils to use. Then you'll have lye, water and a scent.
2 . Tools.
Pans for mixing, molds for forming, spoons for stirring, thermometer for checking and scales for measuring, that's what you need. Then there are molds for forming and maybe cutters for... cutting. It can be simple and cheap. No fancy stuff necessary.
3. Ingredients.
Lye is caustic, but soap requires it. Order it, since it's probably not in a store near you. Oils make soap and it only takes a few. Coconut for lather, palm for hardness, olive for the feel. You can use all kinds of others including pig fat and emu oil, but coconut, palm and olive are the big three and you really need no others.
4. Mixing it up.
Careful measuring is critical. Get the proportions right and you're half done. It's a matter of combining the lye with water first. Then mix all the oils, melting if necessary. Then pour, slowly, the lye/water mix into the oils. Never the other way around. Always wear eye protection and chemical resistant gloves are a plus. Don't pour any of this mix down the drain either.
5. Molds, curing, cutting.
After stirring just to the point where the mix begins to thicken, in the molds it goes. Molds are everywhere. Buy individual bar molds, loaf molds or use what have you. That means most plastic boxes work as molds. Think about cutting before you cut. Using knives on hard soap loaves isn't just hard, it's risky too. Simple soap cutters are often cheap and easy to use.
Handmade soapmaking happens step by step. It's just combining fats and lye in the right mix. Then it's getting the hardening bars in the right shape. It's part science but a whole lot art too.
If you want to know more about Soap, you can read more articles at Sabun Kecantikan.
