Getting Ready for the Holidays!

Every year, I tell myself that I am NOT going to get into a baking frenzy to make gifts for everyone and yet every year I do. Last year it was pumpkin cranberry bread from scratch. I had loaves of pumpkin bread coming out my ears! This year, I decided I'm just going to give away one of my favorite soaps: OATMEAL! See my shop www.ragtree.etsy.com if you would like to purchase one of these bars.

So I cleaned off all my counter space, pulled out my kitchen scale and giant stainless steel pot, and started measuring out my oils. I guess if I have a part of the process that is my least favorite, it is measuring out the oils. My favorite part is mixing the lye with the oils and seeing it form "magically" into soap.

For this batch, I finely ground toasted whole oats into a very fine powder so that the soap exfoliates without scratching. This is by far my most requested soap, especially by men because it smells very earthy and natural. I am also going to add some natural, raw honey into this recipe to combat this drying winter weather.

I experimented with this batch by cutting the water down by almost half in my recipe after reading an article in my Handmade Soapmakers' Guild publication where a chemist had ran a series of experiments varying only the water content and the conclusion was that too little water was much less of a factor in soap-making than too much which could cause separation and incomplete saponification. I will report my results from this experiment in a later post.

Thanks for visiting!

Renee :)