Soap

It is astonishing how much day there is when you get up at seven o’ clock.

Of course we had lots of sleep yesterday, and so woke up this morning feeling very pleased with the world just as the grandfather clock struck seven downstairs. This meant that we had an absolute abundance of day in which to be frivolous before we went to work, which was brilliant.

We made soap.

We have been dying to have a bash at this for absolutely ages. We have never made soap before, and have read lots and lots of things about the best ways to do it, but never actually had enough time with nothing more important filling it up, until today. Also Mark has got fed up with paying twenty quid a bar for soap with a French designer label for me to take in the shower, and has convinced himself that he could do it better.

I was not entirely of the same mind, but all the same over the summer when we had some cash we bought some essential oils and various tubs of fatty gloop with exotic-sounding names ready for experimenting during the dark days of winter.

We re-read the instructions, and Mark, who is far less slapdash than I am, reset the scales so that they were level and properly accurate, which made me laugh, because I have been making perfectly acceptable biscuits and pastry with them for ages, on the principle that scales serve as a rough guideline, and the best way to get proportions right is always to put in an awful lot of the things you like best, like brandy or chocolate or dried apricots, and not bother too much about duller things, like oatmeal or flour. 

I thought we should do soap in much the same way really, although Mark disagreed and wanted to follow the instructions. I said that for all we knew the instructions might have been written by an idiot, regular readers will remember a not-very-distant fudge misfortune, and in the end we followed some of the instructions and made the rest up.

On the whole this seemed to work. We had to start again with the first lot because the lye was too dilute, but we added some more and re-warmed it and it seemed fine. We did two sorts, some that smelled a bit like lime and disinfectant for Mark, and some that smelled a bit like the sort of shops that sell tie-dyed T-shirts and crystals for me.

It all smelled a bit lavenderish as well, because I had filled a bowl with our garden-dried lavender and sloshed a couple of pints of oil in it, and then left it on the sunny office windowsill for a few months, and having made it and put up with the tiresome inconvenience of trying to close the curtains round it carefully for ages, I was quite determined to use it thoroughly.

We poured the finished product into tubs to set, and kept a little bit to try in the shower after our swim, and actually it was not at all bad. Harder than it should  have been, and needed more scent, but it lathered up all right and actually left my skin feeling jolly splendid, clean and fresh, and not greasy.

I do not think I would pay twenty quid a bar for it at this stage of experimentation, but maybe if we iron out the problems for the next batch I might consider a fiver.

It has got to sit in the tubs for a week or so to get to its final consistency, so it might get better anyway. I am very pleased with us and am considering the almost limitless possibilities now available, like clothes-washing soap, and squirty soap for washing your hands, and shampoo, and moisturiser, we could do all sorts of things. 

It would save Mark a fortune.