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A deliscious mild soap that is easy to make once you know the basics.
I love the idea of fancy designer soaps but I also love clean ingredients and so I have experimented to make my own. This soap is a mild exfoliating soap and is so easy to make once you have a basic understanding of the process of hot process soap. I have found that with soap lye changes things and so additives can get hard and I need to plan for that. This is my third soap in my soap making series and if you are new here and haven’t caught my basic soap post go here now to check it out. You will need to follow it to make this soap.
I have also posted a heavenly gardeners hand soap which I love. I have been spending a lot of time with my hands in the dirt out in the garden lately and it has been the best thing to get the grime out of the small cracks and crevices of the skin on my hands. I will be making it every year.
This soap is easy once you have the basic soap recipe
It is super easy to customize the basic soap recipe. I did however do some digging around online looking for ratios and combinations of items that you can add to soap that will work well. When I made the gardener’s hand soap I put chopped up pine needles into it which turned hard and abrasive when the lye cured. That works for a gardener’s soap but it is a little too much for the shower. For this soap I didn’t want it to be so rough but I wanted it to be yummy and unique. Just remember that you really don’t need to add much to the soap when it comes to additives. A little goes a long way.
How to make oat and orange soap from the basic hot process soap recipe.
So to start you need the basic recipe that you can get here. Make sure you have made it at least one time before trying to add anything to it so you know what to do and what to look for when you are making soap.
Ingredients
2 tablespoons grated orange peel (I used clementines).
1/4 cup ground oats. Grind them in the blender. I ground mine into a fairly fine powder.
2 teaspoons sweet orange essential oil.
Extra whole oats and grated orange peel to press into the top for aesthetics.
Follow the entire basic recipe that I linked to above and when you get to the end of your cooking time (50 minutes) stir the grated orange and ground oats into the soap mixture. I like to wait for it to cool a little bit before adding the orange essential oil.
After it has cooled for a little bit I add my oil and stir it all up. You can add up to 1/4 cup water if it is hard to stir.
Then I plop it all down into my prepared mold. You can use almost anything that is not metal as a soap mold. Press the extra orange peel and whole oats into the top to make it look fancy.
I normally set it outside to cool. Sometimes I cover it to try to keep the essential oils from evaporating out. After about 12 hours you can take it out and cut it into bars. It is usable right away but it will be better if you let it cure for about 1 week.
Some last things to know about this soap.
Since this is an all natural soap it will not have a strong scent. If you want a stronger orange scent then you can buy some fragrance from a soap dealer. I have done some reading and a lot of people say that if it is orange it will trick the mind into smelling stronger. I even read this funny story about a soap maker with a storefront who experimented with this and customers overwhelmingly said that the orange colored soap smelled stronger.
For this recipe I actually put some of my soap oils in a small oil warmer with some paprika and let it infuse for a few days to create an orange dye. I didn’t include this step in the instructions above because I don’t think I will do it again. It was just an extra step that I don’t care to do and the paprika actually changed to more of a brown after the soap cooked in the slow cooker. If you want orange colored soap you can buy orange dye for soap online but again, that sort of defeats the purpose of making all natural soap at home.
Remember to have safe soap making practices.
While making soap at home is super easy, economical, and fun you do have to remember to be safe with your lye. Lye can be dangerous so make sure to wear the proper safety gear of long sleeves and eye protection. You will also need good ventilation for when you are mixing your lye. I like to use my back porch and I make sure to keep my kids away.
Thanks for stopping by. Let me know how this soap making goes for you and have a wonderful week!
