#soap | That Ozark Homesteader

Christmas Savings

Hey all,

With Christmas literally just days away, I got to thinking about how we go about saving money for Christmas and other times of the year. Here’s one thing we do.

As homesteaders, my family is always looking for ways to be frugal. One of the things we have started doing a few years back, is making the liquid laundry soap that the Duggar family makes. We’v.e found that it enables us to make large batches of soap fairly cheaply and we get more soap this way.

Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

• 4 cups hot tap water

• 1 Fels-Naptha soap bar

• 1 cup Arm & Hammer super washing soda (not baking soda or detergent!)

• 1/2 cup borax

Preparation Instructions

1 Grate the bar of Fels-Naptha soap; place in saucepan with water over medium-high heat. Stir soap constantly until dissolved.

2 Fill half of a 5 gallon bucket (2.5 gallons) with hot tap water.

3 Add melted soap from saucepan, washing soda and borax to bucket. Stir until completely dissolved.

4 Fill remainder of bucket with hot tap water; let sit overnight.

5 (Optional: add 10-15 drops of essential oil to two gallons of concentrated soap after it has cooled.)

6 When ready to use, fill half of a clean laundry soap dispenser with the soap concentration and the other half with water. The two will form a gel.

We use 3/4ths of a cup of this to wash our clothes. It saves a lot on money. This is especially helpful in terms of all the extra things you can buy when you aren’t paying as much for laundry soap. Christmas just got easier.

Until next time,

Homestead in health ya’ll,

Emily

My family makes our own soap. Sometimes we make goat’s milk which is my favourite, and other times, we make soap like the one I made today. The soap I made today is 19th century soap.

I made one batch of lavender, and one batch of peppermint soap. The one big thing I have to say about soap making when you are making lye soap, is be very careful with anything that has lye in it. I made the mistake of adding water to the lye while my face was still over the pitcher. Bad idea! It about shut down my breathing and my eye sight for a few minutes. I’m ok now, but that’s a mistake I won’t make again. I also did get some lye soap on my skin while I was working. The way to stop the burning is to put white vinegar over the spot that got splashed. That neutralizes the lye. This is what the lye looks like before it is put into soap after you’ve turned it into liquid form:

Once the soap is made, you need to let it set wrapped in towels in a warm place for two weeks so that the lye can supponify with the fat in the soap. This soap used coconut oil, olive oil and goat fat. This was what that looked like melted down and ready to mix with the liquefied lye:

If soap making is something that you would like to learn to do, I would recommend this book:

It’s what my family uses in our soap making. I love being able to control what goes into my soaps. We uses lighter scents or no scent in our soaps most of the time. I have very sensitive skin so I have to be careful about scents.

I was very excited recently though because I got 3 trays of a new mold. Horse soap, here we come!