Coconut Oil Soap

Ever since I first read about properties of different oils for soap making and found information that even though large amount of coconut oil in soap can be drying for the skin, it is still possible to make a good, nondrying Coconut oil soap, I wanted to try making one myself.

Some of my soap making buddies even make 100% Coconut oil soap without lye discount and they swear that it's the best soap for the laundry. I didn't want to use so much Coconut oil for a laundry soap, because it's not a very cheap ingredient here in Greece, but I decided to make a small batch of Laundry soap with 50% Coconut oil and 50% Lard. While I was at it, I figured i could try making a small batch of 100% Coconut oil soap with the remaining 250 g of oil I had left.

How to Prepare Lard for Soap Making

Why Lard?

As you probably know, I live in Greece, in the beautiful peninsula called Halkidiki. I would say the nature has been very generous here and provided us with sea, long sand beaches, clean drinking water, mountains covered in Pine, Oak and Chestnut forests. Hills and valleys are mostly covered with olive farms, some Apricot orchards and livestock farms that supply local butcher stores with meat. Halkidiki is also known for its tradition of beekeeping, which is mentioned by Aristotle in 4th century B.C. Today Halkidiki holds 10% of Greek honey production and it is most densely populated area in regards to beehives. There are 84 beehives per square kilometer in Halkidiki, while the average density of beehives in Greece, which ranks first in Europe, is only 11 per square kilometer.

 This area has also been blessed (or cursed) with the presence of gold, silver and magnesite, and therefore we have several operating mines as well as one (at Skouries location) that still haven't started mining, because they have been strongly opposed by our local community for years, due to immense danger they pose for our lives and the nature of Halkidiki, but also because of numeral transgressions by the company that has bought the mine for dimes with the help of corrupted politicians who were in government at the time. So, we try very hard to preserve the nature here, nature's balance is not just some abstract concept for us, it's literary the foundation of our survival, because everything, from olive farms, beekeeping and livestock farms to tourism depends on that balance. Our economy is mostly based on agriculture, beekeeping, fishing and tourism. You can imagine how the pollution or lack of clean water would affect those, not to mention air pollution.

So, I can say that yes, I am interested and invested personally in environmental issues. Having said that, I am not by default a vegan, and I'm not opposed to using lard for making soap. I've read a lot about lard before trying to render some myself and I am convinced that this is an amazing, cheap ingredient for soap.

Soap Adventures of last couple of months | Photo Gallery

Here are some pics of my latest soap adventures that I still haven't had time to write about. Coloring soaps using Alkanet root is definitely something worth writing about and I intend to explore this more. I've already experimented with different alkanet oil infusions and got some interesting results that vary among light green to dark purple, but more about it in some future post.

Using Alkanet root to color soap

This particular soap was named "Lavender Crocus" by my friend Carolyne because of some interesting swirls that resulted in something resembling Crocus flower in her opinion. It was colored with Alkanet root infused in Almond oil and TiO2. More about it later.

This soap was inspired by Lemon Poppy Seed soap by Soap Queen, except instead of using Lemon fragrance for this project, I've used Silk Melon Fragrance and Spearmint EO. My friends said it reminds them of Lemon Merengue and we ended up calling it Melon Merengue. The bottom half is colored with just a few drops of Carrot infused Olive oil and I added TiO2 to the upper half. The final touch were poppy seeds which I added for exfoliation as well as esthetic reasons. 

Recycling the used cooking oil

I hate to waste stuff, especially oil, so I always try to find another use for stuff that is considered waste. Here in Greece we often use Olive oil for frying and since my husband loves fried potatoes, there's a lot of frying going on in our kitchen and I always feel uneasy about discarding it after use. I mean, what do you do with it once you have fried those potatoes? Do you dump it in the sink? That doesn't seam like a good idea. Dump it in the garbage? More likely, but how? Some people pour it into plastic bottles before dumping it. I didn't feel good about any of those options, and I wanted to find a way to reuse it, but not for making body soap, because I like to use clean Olive oil for that (even though I know some companies recycle waste oil and make soaps for hands and body). There is a company here in Greece that recycles oils and trades them for laundry detergent or soaps and they pass by my house sometimes, but not regularly and I still haven't pinpointed their schedule. 

Last Minute Birthday Gift

Hello Everyone! I know it's been awhile...almost four months since I last posted here, but that doesn't mean I haven't been soaping. Because, well, how can you abstain from soaping for four  months really? I've made seven batches of cold process soap since my last post and I've been reading and watching videos on how to make liquid soap. I must say that my friend Darinka from DI Prirodni Sapuni was instrumental in braking my resistance to spending four hours or so cooking soap, but more about that when I buy KOH and get to business.

For now I just thought to say hello and post some pics of this DIY box I made following this Soaping 101 video and tweaking it a bit to fit my needs.

The thing is, my kids had, not one, not two, but four (what is it with the number 4 in this post anyway...) birthdays to go to last week and while they did shop for some gifts earlier, they didn't find gifts for everyone and I had to save the day with soaps. So I took a large sheet from my daughter's aquarelle block, folded it so that one side is about half a centimeter larger than the other and cut it where it was folded.

New Soaps and lots of New Ideas...

The swirl in this soap is made by taking some of the soap and
 adding Vanilla fragrance to it. The rest is colored with Titanium Dioxide

I'm back, with some new soaps and lots of new ideas. I hope I'll manage to give life to those ideas and share some of my enthusiasm for handmade soaps and soapmaking with you.

These are two new soaps I made couple of days ago. I've changed the dimensions of soap so it would fit better in hand. New dimensions range from 5cm x 2.5cm x 6cm to 6cm x2.5cm x 7cm, and they weigh 90-100 gramms each. These soaps need to cure for at least 4 weeks, but I was pleased that someone couldn't wait to get their hands on it, so I've already sold some of them.

Lavender & Mastic Soap: First time doing a Secret Swirl

Hello everyone! I've been busy soaping lately and I didn't have much time to blog about it. This is the soap I made back in March and it was the first time I tried the secret swirl or the so called "hanger swirl". It was also the first time I used Mastic in soap, but since then I wrote about couple of other soaps I made with Mastic, but forgot to write about this one that was actually the first.

I used Olive oil, Palm oil, Coconut oil, Shea butter and Castor oil for this batch of soap.

Mastic resins in the mortar

So, the first thing I did was to ground the Mastic resins in the mortar until it turned into powder. Then I set it aside and prepared my oils and lye.