A couple weeks ago I was in Portland making things with friends.  In particular we made soap.  Sadly, not the type Tyler Durden makes while prepping for awesome ninja adventures, but still, it was pretty amazing.

Soap, like fire, is one of the basic things that keeps us healthy happy humans.  It also happens to be something I’ve never made.  Liz has though, and so she, Aaron, and I spent Saturday morning making soap, and it was Awesome! 

Here is a photo journal of the process,

 Selecting ingredients and getting ready:

Basically it’s pretty simple, lye gets combined with some sort of fat product at about 135F to create trace.  Essential oils (or whatever weird stuff I chose to put in my soap) gets added at this point. 

I made three types of soap (which I will classify by their given names): coffee soap (bacon based), cedar soap (olive oil based) and rose soap (canola oil based). 

Here is the bacon fat heating:

Here is the mortar and pestle used to grind up the coffee, chili peppers, cedar wood, etc.:

The lye waiting to be mixed with water :

Essential oils ready for adding (Liz had an awesome selection needing to be used).

Cedar for decoration:

Rose petals for decoration:

Aaron stirring the trace:

Coffee and chili for adding and decoration:

Liz measuring the water to add to the lye:

Aaron monitoring the lye solution as it cooled to the proper temp:

My three soaps all done! Now they have to sit for a month to properly harden (and lose most of their color).

1. Wake Up Soap! Bacon fat, ground dried chili, menthol, cayenne, ground Indian coffee
2. Castilian Beauty Soap: Olive oil, red rose petals, rosemary, clary sage, lavender, honey, vanilla extract
3. An attempt to make soap that is actually usable by humans: Canola oil, ground cedar wood, peppermint, ground apricot pits for exfoliation

One of Liz and Aaron’s monster bars:

The cool hat I crocheted that evening!

The weekend was quite an adventure in science and domestic awesomeness.  Thanks Liz for the know-how and supplies!  Later we used the glycerin from the soap to break into a DNA sequencing lab (well mostly it was Liz’s key and access code) and spun heavy whipping in a centrifuge.  We determined there is a fundamental difference between the fat in organic whipping cream versus cheep-o brand whipping cream.  Imagine that!