Friday, July 31, 2009

Welcome to Mossy Creek Soap!

This is our story....

I bought my 1st handmade bar of soap 3 years ago. It was goats milk with all sorts of luxury oils in it and I absolutely love it! I was ready to reorder and went on a search to find my soap maker..... No luck on the Internet or phone. I asked everyone I knew about it and then one day I got the dreaded news.... She had went out of business.. Well I thought maybe I could buy the business from her. I looked into it, but then found out my husband was interested to learn how we could make our "own" soap. I was ecstatic. WOW I never thought we could. I then bought all the books (anyone that knows me will know..when I say all I mean all the books), ingredients and equipment.

Our 1st batch was very amusing because of everything we have read about working with LYE and we were trying to be very careful.

There we were.. We had donned our masks and gloves. We mixed the lye into the water (not the other way around as the book stated) and waited.... So it began to immediately heat up... We watched as if we were waiting for it to explode or something. We looked at each other as if to give an "OK" that we were on our way. I then went into the kitchen to began mixing the oils to get ready for the lye mixture. I placed my newly bought candy thermometer in the pot to carefully watch the temperature so we could add the LYE. We waited, waited and waited for the oil to cool down (I evidently heated them to much). Ok so now it was time to add the LYE... OK. I call out to my husband it's time to mix the lye with the oils. He then came in with the LYE mixture and we mixed it into the oils. WOW this was exciting! We are making soap! Ok, so then we watched the mixture turn into a pudding consistency called trace, then poured it into the mold. Ok.. so there we did it. It was in the mold. WOW, we did it! Now all we have to do is clean up and wait 24 hours before we could unmold it and let it cure for 1 month. It seemed simple enough. Well....... during clean up my husband noticed a piece missing from the newly bought candy thermometer....????? I checked it..OMG it was true!!!! There was a piece missing. IT MUST BE IN THE SOAP! So there we stood.. We would never be able to get that glass piece out and we would never be able to use it either. Needless to say we never used it. So to this day we still have that soap as a reminder and a keepsake of our 1st batch. We will never really know how good it was.

We have made some very delicious soap since that day and continue to enjoy our soapmaking together. Although sometimes we get into each others hair we still manage to enjoy this thing called soapmaking.