How to Make Your Own Soap – Part 2: Preparing to Mix

So you’d like to make your own soaps? You’ve come to the right place. Today I’m going to show you to make your own handmade soaps.

A quick note: Since every soap recipe is different, I won’t be going into exact measurements for each step. You will learn some Best Practices and tricks along the way.

This is Part 2 of a 7 part series. In Part 1, I demonstrated how to prepare your lye-water for the soap making process. Now that we have our lye-water, it’s time to put it to use!

Now you have your lye-water in a pot. It’s hot! How to we cool it down quickly and without adding additional water to the pot? We take it to our mop-sink for a Cold Water Bath.

If you, like me, don’t have an extremely cold faucet, there is a trick you can use to create very cold water very quickly. The night before you make your soap, fill up 5 or 10 plastic water bottles with water then freeze them. Be sure not to fill them all the way up to the top, just about 85% of the way full. The next morning you’ll be able to take these frozen bottles of water and place them in your mop-sink to create a very cold, Cold Water Bath.

We want the lye-water to reach a temperature of about 100 degrees. Once it’s ready, we’ll take it and set it next to our oils which have also cooled to 100 degrees. Now we’ll begin to mix the two. To mix these, I use a Cusinart imeersion blender which has proven to be a sturdy and reliable tool for soap-making.

Come back again soon for the next step, where we’ll begin to mix the ingredients together!