Introduction to Soap Making

Service Description

In this introduction to soap making, you will learn how to make a pure lard soap from scratch.  We will explain how to render the fat into lard, touching on the aspects of the many uses of lard for both the home and body.  You will learn about the equipment used to make soap, safety gear and precautions to take, as well as tips and tricks for making inexpensive, locally-sourced soap for you and your family.     We will then demonstrate the lye process, which can be the most intimidating part of soap making for beginners and is often what prevents people from trying to make soap in the first place!  And after that, we’re onto the races for mixing the lye water with our melted lard and making soap.  We will then demo how to pour the batter into a mold, as well as different methods to cut the loaf of soap when it's ready.  And although the soap that we will make during the workshop will not be ready to take home as it requires a couple of weeks of cure time to be safe to use, we will send you home with six bars of soap and the recipe for the pure lard soap.    This workshop will focus on making a basic pure lard soap, which once you master a basic recipe, you can then go on to add different ingredients to your soap, including infusing various botanicals and delving into trickier recipes like milk soap and honey soap.  Due to extreme sensitivities to fragrance, we do not add essential oils or synthetic fragrance to our soaps, therefore, we will not be discussing those ingredients in our workshop.  However, we will send you home with some great online resources to explore those topics if you’re interested.  We also do not add any imported oils or butters to our soap, just pure local lard - just like great grandmother used to make it - but with some added twists and a slightly more accurate way of measuring the lye to ensure you make a nice, soothing bar of soap instead of a lye heavy skin remover!