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| Clockwise from top left: Lavender shampoo bars, cinnamon-clove bath bars, tea tree bath bars. |
On Sunday, we made three batches of soap. The first bars we made were shampoo bars. We used this formula from The Crunchy Chicken as a starting point. As advised, we used the jojoba and caIstor oils, but we changed the other oils to coconut and olive. (Because we changed oils, we were sure to run the changed formula through a soap calculator to find out the exact amounts of lye and water we needed.)
Shane and I have both been using our homemade soap as shampoo for months, but we wanted to see if this formula really is better for hair. We wanted to encourage Kat to use it, too, so we scented it with lavender essential oil and a bit of lavender tint.
We also made more bath soap. With Shane's help or without, I've made about six batches of soap so far, using different oils each time. This time we decided to go back to our very first formula, because we seem to like it best. It is made with olive, coconut, rice bran, and peanut oils. We made a fairly large batch and split it. We added tea tree oil and a touch of green tint to one half. To the other half, we mixed in essential clove oil, 1/ teaspoon ground cinnamon and some pink soap tint. It has a wonderful fragrance and a pretty speckled color.
These soaps will be ready to use in 4-6 weeks. Meanwhile, we're using the last of two batches that were cedarwood/juniper scented (with some whole juniper berries mixed in) and lavender scented.
