What kind of soap do you make? Hot process? Cold process? What your family fave?
Discussion
I make cold process lye soap and hot process shampoo bars. This batch I used sunflower, jojoba, coconut, castor oil with no essential oil. This one thickened up on me really fast and I had to get it in the mold without essentially oil. It's alright, it still cleans. I also make my own beard oil and we use oils with our herbs (apothecary) so each batch of soap depends on what oil we have the most of (using soapcalc).
I can't really say we have a favorite. I make a batch every year and a half or so. With only three of us left in the house it takes a long time to use a batch. We have four daughters and used to use a lot more soap. We enjoy the "old world" type skills and doing stuff for ourselves as chemical free as we can. .
Excellent!! I love that you use herbs from your garden. We are lucky here in New Zealand to have friends with a beautiful olive grove. We help them pick and press every year and use that to make the soap (along with nz avocado oil, coconut oil, and essential oils too) I love making something that we use every day. I have accidentally left the eo out a few times. 🤦♀️
Fresh olive oil sounds amazing! Here is the US our olive oil is being diluted, even bottles that say pure olive oil has been lab tested to be contaminated. We still use it but not like we used to. Coconut oil and specialty oils are safer (argon, castor, jojoba, tamanu, etc) we have stricter requirements for cosmetics than we do for food. We grow some herbs, but we use a lot more medicinally. We try staying with native plants but we do order some.