A 'Little' Soap in the Making

Soap Making The melt and pour method

This method is not the traditional method and certainly not the method they used back in the day. However, I was pregnant at the time and could not give the real method a go, so I decided to have fun with melt and pour soap. What is the difference? Traditionally soap is made from scratch. You make the base, then turn it into soap. During the time of Little "House on the Prairie", they would have used everything they had in their home and on their farm, including wood ash. In traditional soap making, the main and most important ingredient is lye. Nowadays, you can buy this, but back then, settlers used wood ash from their fires to make it. They would pile the ash in wooden barrels with a small hole at the bottom. They would continuously pour water over it until a brownish liquid poured out. This was called leaching. Next, they would collect fat or lard from the animals they had butchered for food in the fall or the grease from the year of cooking. They would clean or render the lard by putting it in a pot over an open fire outside. The pot would have equal parts Lard and water. This was boiled down over a period of time. All soap making was done outside as it could be dangerous and the smell from the fats and rancid grease would be too terrible to have in a home. After it was boiled down, another bit of water was added and the mixture was left to cool, creating a layer of fresh fat. This fat and the lye was then boiled together until it formed a large frothy mass.

The soap made this way was not like our hard soap, it was more like a jelly substance that was scooped out when needed. To make it hard, a special salt was used during the boiling process. Salt was expensive and often times hard to get so it was not typically used in soap making. Nowadays, all the ingredients can be bought and mixed together. It still needs to be done outside or in a well-ventilated area, as the lye is very dangerous. Children should not help with this process of soap making. (Even when using the store-bought lye).

Melt and pour soap, which is the method I used, is fun and can be done as a quick and fun activity with children. I bought goats milk base and shea butter base. I heated the shea butter base up in a disposable measuring cup at 30 second intervals like I had read. It was awful!!! It smelled terrible and only became a sticky, goopy, stringy mass that only proceeded to get worse. After cleaning everything up, I gave the goats milk base a try. It worked!! It did not have a terrible smell and melted perfectly. After experimenting with dye powders (mica powder) and essential oils, I made bar of soap after bar of soap. It was fun and I will definitely do it again with my children. We do plan on making soap the traditional way with wood ash but have yet to get to it.