Soap Lily: We've been busy, you just can't see it

July 9, 2014 Wednesday

Honestly, we didn't drop off the face of the earth, the first half of this week we have been playing catch up on our dull, but necessary paperwork. Alison and I have been reviewing the last three or four weeks of our soap making, we were way behind on figuring our cost calculations, wrapping the bars of soap, and making the labels for them. While working the cost calculations we discovered the sad fact that if we don't make notations when we make soap, we have a hard time remembering exactly what lye we used, or where the Castor oil came from etc.

It may sound unimportant, but when we try to figure out exactly how much money we have in a bar of soap, origin and cost of ingredients is critical. As you know if you've read this blog very long, we search high and low for the quality ingredients we need at the lowest prices. It makes us crazy as there is so much out there, but our costs have consistently come down as a direct result of our shopping savvy, i.e. it pays off.

Today we printed off the last of the labels for soaps that are cured or will be soon, chose fabrics with which to wrap the soap, and finished our cost calculations - all of which made us very happy. Since we finished all the "paper work" fairly early in the day, we decided to tackle something we both are anxious to try - Bug-Be-Gone soap!

Yes, Bug-Be-Gone. It is made up of the following EO (essential oils): citronella, lemongrass, orange, eucalyptus and litsea cubeba - plus we added tea tree oil as an extra bug-zapping bonus. According to the Lebermuth Co where we purchased the Bug-Be-Gone, "These EO's effectively discourage those unwanted flies and mosquitoes when added to soaps, sprays, lotions or candles".

Everything we've been able to find about bug repellent soap or lotion recipes list those ingredients in some combination or another. We've made the Bug-Be-Gone candles, and they seemed to help keep the mosquitoes off our porches, so without further ado we delve into what we hope will be a soap that when used, will leave a scent on the skin that bugs do not like...that's the idea anyway.

Since we want to use the soap ASAP, we decided to use the HP (hot process) method, it can cure for a week then we will be our own guinea pigs and report back as to how effective it is.

The recipe we used comes from Soap Making Resource. It was originally designed as a CP (cold process) recipe, however we easily changed his scents and made it using HP (hot process). We used olive, sweet almond, coconut, sustainable palm, palm kernel and Castor oils with the Bug-Be-Gone essential oil blend and Tree Tree oil.

The main consideration when using the HP method is to know the flash point of the fragrance or essential oils. You can see in the picture above that the flash point for the BBG oil is 70 degrees C, which is close to 160 degrees F. We just had to be sure that the soap was below that temperature before adding the essential oils.

We didn't take many pictures of the actual soap making process. Basically we mixed our oils in the crock pot, added the lye/water, stick blended it to a medium trace and put the lid on it.

We checked the progress every fifteen minutes, and after about one and a half hours we checked the PH and did a zap test. No zap, just the taste of soap, so we declared Bug-Be-Gone soap done.

We put the soap into the log mold, let it sit overnight and cut it on Thursday.

The soap smells nice; you can pick up most of the EO scents that are in the BBG oil. While we were washing out the crock pot Alison modeled the lather. It was soft, and soaped very nicely, leaving a slight (not overpowering) smell on her hands.