How to make Lavender Soap - Colne Soap Makers

Make your Own Soap at Home

This is something we filmed over nine months ago, when we were developing our soap, it;'s been edited so it condenses "How to make Soap", in less than 10 minutes. For some reason I didn't release it at the time, and didn't even include a recipe, durh!

I just found it again, here it is, I will find a good starter recipe in the next couple of days, so you could make your own soap at home. I hope you find it interesting. It's a typical BBC Blue Peter, "How you could do it home with fruit juice moulds", but I hope you find it interesting. (BTW, We don't quite do it like this any more, and have purpose built moulds, but you'll get the gist).

Moroccan Moon - with Coffee

Honey and benzoine give this tan specimen a rich nutty caramel fragrance. A sprinkling of dried coffee provides two dark layers and soft exfoliating characteristics to the soap.

It has been poured in three layers and scalloped on the top surface. It also combines a tube of pure Colne Bar, to make a moon affect, set above a Moroccan landscape (with a little bit of imagination and squinting you might see it too).

Probably our most adventurous, when we made it, incorporating several techniques and combinations. I had to work fast during the final stages, as it was prone to set quickly.

Moroccan Moon has evolved into several soaps in their own right. 

Spice Machiato, takes the Coffee theme a little further and combined with a coffee brew, it  makes a masculine bar. The embedded dried ground coffee, provides the base colouring and embedded lightly through out, gives a definite ex-foliating quality to the bar.

Customers have expressed surprised exclamations, and have come back to tell us, "That coffee thing, you know it actually works!"

Well we hoped it would. (I'll let you into a secret, it wasn't all guess work).

Maldon Mudlark, is rich dark brown and combines cinnamon and coffee to make this an extremely fragrant bar to use, good for working hands but being based on Colne Bar is moisturising too.

An invigorating bar to use at the end of your day.

Wrapped Soap

Current Stock

You can now see our current stock in the gadget on the top right column. It tracks our batches directly so it is up to date, if you can't make it to one of the Farmers Markets or local outlets, then you can always email your order to orders@colnesoapmakers.co.uk.

Wrapped Soap for Sale

The photograph above shows our soap wrapped ready for sale in one of our soap boxes.

The waxed paper protects the soap after curing, but it still allows the colour to show through slightly.

History of Soap making

An occasional history of soap making...

'as old as olives'

Christian and I were talking about the olive tree the other night. This was possibly because we were eating olives, with a glass of wine, while Christian was cooking a goat stew.

There's more about goats later, but to get back to the olive tree - it gives us shade; the leaves are said to be medicinal; we can eat the fruit and also press it into my favourite oil for culinary use and natural skincare (including our soap). It is no accident that olive oil is the largest ingredient by weight in our Colne Bar.

As well as all this, the tree gives you a nicely grained hardwood that can be used to make beautiful bowls and furniture.

The olive tree is thought to originate from Syria, which is still a significant producer of olive oil. From Syria, the olive spread fast to Mediterranean countries, most notably Ancient Greece, where the tree was considered holy and you could be punished for cutting one down.

Maybe the olives are a small diversion however, (patience grasshopper) as the first recorded recipes for soap contained different oils. The earliest record of the production of soap-like material dates back to around 2800 BC in Ancient Babylon. This was a formula for soap consisting of water, alkali and cassia oil, written on a Babylonian clay tablet around 2200 BC. However, I quite liked the recipe (550 BC) for soap containing ashes, cypress oil and sesame seed oil, "for washing the stones for the servant girls". It must have made the lives of those hardworking young women a lot easier.

The ashes provided the alkali necessary to saponify the oils to make soap. Wood-ash was, and still is the alkali most readily available for the production of handmade soap – hand made of necessity, by homesteaders in the wild west and elsewhere, and still today, in countries with lower levels of material well-being. Tallow or other animal fats were used by homesteaders, however in places where vegetable oils can be economically extracted, these might be used too. I've recently read about some new soap-recycling schemes aimed at the less economically developed parts of the world. This is one of them: http://www.cleantheworld.org/– but perhaps there are other interventions that could be effective in helping control disease and wouldn't involve energy expended in mechanically re-processing and transporting used bits of soap thousands of miles. Making soap by hand involves very little energy and is something people have done for millennia. I note however that there are significant tax benefits for the US hotels participating in this scheme.

So, oil and alkali and the beginnings of soap in Ancient Babylon.

There is a soap museum in Sidon, in Lebanon- part of the Ancient Babylonion empire. http://www.itnsource.com/shotlist/RTV/2010/03/15/RTV649210/?v=1&a=0

Searching around all the sources on this, I found the 'old as olives' quote, which I like very much. Here it is in full:

'Soap industry on the Lebanese coast is as old as olives. The age of olives extending in the area from Palestine towards the Lebanese coast goes back to thousands of years BC'

I'd guess that the soap in the Lebanese museum could still produce a lather, but might have lost a lot of its water content over all those years. I've always wanted to go to Lebanon...

http://www.discoverlebanon.com/introduction_movie_presentation.php

Aah the goats, oops nearly forgot about them. A clue- goatsmilk lovely stuff. As good in soap as olive oil. (not to be confused with Olive Oyl)

Photo of Sidon Soap Musem: - copyright of the photo pertains as follows:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License

Product page updated

After cutting the latest batch of Grubby Gardener this morning, I have managed to get our products page updated with the Summer Soap photographs. These soaps were launched at the Rowhedge Regatta last Saturday.

Some people who saw us at the Regatta have stopped me in the street and asked for a product list so I made an A4 flyer, and have now completed an on-line version with photographs of each soap.

A Real success at Rowhedge Regatta

3rd July arrived and everything was packed and ready for the stall. Fabian had lent us a beautiful yellow trestle table and late the previous night, Clare had located the only spare gazebo in the village still intact after the windy Saturday of the Strawberry Fair. So on the morning of the Regatta all we had to do was take it all across to the quay, set it up and sell soap... And so we did!

I liked to see which soaps interested different people, (and why) and the most popular - on that hot and sticky day - was the refreshing and cleansing tea-tree oil soap we call Grubby Gardener. It also has sweet orange and cedar wood essential oils, as well as rose madder root, which colours it a deep red/maroon. Perhaps it was because I told everyone that the first thing I do when I get home on a hot day is use it to wash my feet. (well, not until we've made some more, I won't be, as we nearly ran out of it on Saturday- only a few bars left until the next batch is ready)

Christian's Volcanic Lava Swirl came a close second- sweet orange oil again, but this time mixed with geranium oil- a lovely combination. Lots of things noted from people's comments and suggestions for the next range- clove, cinnamon and orange for winter will be a definite, I think.

Lavender was popular and we also gave out samples of Dave's Soap (with nothing in it) to several people who need to use very pure soap on their skin.

We offered hand washing opportunities on a small table in the gazebo- a chance to wash off the ice-cream and candy floss and try different types of soap. There were several children with extremely clean hands that afternoon, having made extensive use of this facility. Friends' children were however very useful for running errands - Charlie kindly ran home to re-fill our water container and Tilly left us a cuddly lamb, for company.

The gazebo provided a shelter for some of the visiting grandmas, too. Our stall was right on the front of the quay, offering unrivalled views of the duck race, blindfold canoeing and visiting barges and smacks. The ladies we accumulated over the course of the afternoon therefore had a shady place to sit, in our very comfy fold-up chairs and they didn't miss a thing (we might do them a nice cup of tea next time). Maz's mum, down from the North, for her very first Regatta: 'Well, I liked your stall, but I've really enjoyed just sitting here these last couple of hours' she said, as she made her way off to check if she'd won the lucky programme draw.

Look out for some of Christian's photos of Regatta day and the River Colne, coming soon...

10 simple ways to use less oil | Greenpeace International

Saw this on Facebook this evening:

10 simple ways to use less oil | Greenpeace International

The simple ways to use less oil in relation to products are:

• Prefer products packaged without plastic.
• Buy beauty products (shampoo, soap, make-up) based on natural ingredients, not oil.
• Prefer locally produced products (less transport involved).

These all apply to our soap- and, in addition, handmade cold process soap uses very little energy in the making- our natural vegetable oils are melted and heated for just a short while, to get them to the correct temperature before we add the lye-water and that's it. Everything else is done by hand. So a lot greener than mass-produced cleansing products. And no parabens or SLS.