Soap-ery!

Last Sunday (November 14), my friend Sara and I attended a soap making class at Abbey Brown Artisan Soaps. The place is great! The store has such a rustic feel to it and almost everything sold there is locally made. The soap process we learned about is called "cold process" which involves saponification...our teacher's favorite word...and saponification is a chemical process that allows oil and water to mix by using lye. By the way, I had no idea how dangerous it is to use lye! In fact, it is so bad that our teacher had to mix the lye water before we got to the workshop. I also had no idea how precise everything has to be measured and weighed out before it can be mixed together. Anyways, in layman's terms, the cold process of soap making calls for about three weeks before the soap can be used. Unfortunately that also meant that Sara and I could not take home the soap we helped make...but we did get to pick out a bar from the last class' batch. We made Lavender, Lemongrass, and Mango (I chose Mango, definitely a good choice).

Here are some photos from the day!

Those drawers next to our teacher are what the soaps are stored in! We made enough to fill three drawers: 300 bars of soap

The additional oils. These are added to the essential oils and the lye water mixture.

The staging area. 

Scraping the soap to get every last drop out. I think that is the Mango soap.

This class was definitely the most informative workshop I've taken so far. I think the Abbey Brown soap class is really meant for people who are seriously interested in continuing on to make their own soaps/ those who already have a background in soap making. A lot of the time was devoted to the teacher going into great detail about the processes and oils and where to get material and safety measures; all extremely important, it just was not what I was expecting. Still totally cool though. Now I understand how very hard and complicated it is to make one's own soap.