Our soap is handcrafted using a small assortment of natural ingredients:

|| Four Key Ingredients ||

These four items are the key ingredients in our soap recipes:

Goat Milk:
Goat milk is great for sensitive skin. It contains natural ingredients that help to remove dead skin cells, leaving new smoother cells. Goat milk also contains vitamins and minerals ideal for healthy skin. The cream found in goat milk is a natural moisturizer. Our goat milk comes right from our small Nigerian Dwarf Goat herd.

Coconut Oil:
Coconut oil has high cleansing properties, produces a fluffy lather, and adds hardness to the soap.

Olive Oil:
Olive oil is mild, making it ideal for sensitive skin. It also adds hardness to the soap.

Sodium Hydroxide:
Sodium Hydroxide, or lye, is used in all real soap – even the store bought soap. They are just better at disguising the name.
We mix goat milk, lye, and oil together. A few days later, the ingredients have chemically changed into soap. At the end of the curing process, about 4 weeks, there is no lye left – only pure soap.

|| Other Butter, Fat, & Oils ||

You may also find these other butter, fat, and oils in our soap:

Almond Oil, sweet:
Almond oil has mild cleansing properties.

Avocado Oil:
Avocado oil is mild cleansing, high in vitamin E, and adds hardness to the soap.

Castor Oil:
Castor oil enhances the lather in soap.

Lard:
Lard is used to add hardness to soap. It also produces lather. To be as sustainable as possible, I render the lard from pigs raised on our farm.

Rice Bran Oil:
Rice Bran oil is mild cleansing and provides the soap with a bit of a sheen.

Shea Butter:
Shea butter contains many vitamins for healthy skin and natural moisturizer.

|| Fragrance & Color ||

Essential Oils:
I use the natural scents of essential oils to add fragrance to soap. I am not a fan of strong smells, so our soaps are lightly scented.

Mica:
Mica is a group of minerals that have been purified and crushed into a fine powder. I use this natural source to add color to soap.

|| Exfoliating ||

Apricot Kernels, crushed
Oatmeal
Poppy Seeds
Pumice Stone, ground

|| Other ||

Activated Charcoal:
Activated charcoal is especially great for those with oily skin, as it absorbs oils and dirt.

Honey:
I use locally sourced honey for the moisturizing and lathering qualities. It also gives a slight sweet scent.

That’s it. You will only find a combination of these natural ingredients in our soap. No harsh chemicals that can be irritating to your skin.

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That’s a wrap. We are in the final week of 2016.

In next week’s post I will recap the year of goods, bads, things learned & memories made.

• Every few years we make gingerbread houses. It was time to do them.

• My homemade soap is cured – perfect timing for gift giving

• I got a silhouette cameo and heat press this year. Pretty much everyone got a personalized goodie.

• Our 2 youngest kids were in the Christmas play at church.

• Christmas Eve menu included homemade cheddar broccoli soup and clam chowder in bread bowls.

• Just for fun, I made rustic smelling fire starters.

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• We often have deer in our yard. This week I chose to take their pics hangin’ with the chickens.
• For quite awhile I have been wanting to make goat milk soap. Now that we have a goat in milk I gave it a whirl. I plan to do a separate post on the process I used and what I thought about it.

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There are many homemade laundry soap recipes out there. Here’s the one that works for us:

INGREDIENTS

1 cup Washing Soda
1 cup Borax
1 bar Fels-Naptha soap

DIRECTIONS

When I first started making laundry soap I grated the soap by hand. Although it’s totally doable, I hated it. I always grated off a piece of skin from slipping while pushing hard on the soap. Now I use the slicer/shredder attachment on my Kitchen Aid. It works wonderfully.

I add the borax and washing soda to the soap & my laundry detergent is complete. Super Simple.
This shoe box sized container holds 5x the original recipe. So, 5 bars of soap, 5 cups of borax & 5 cups of washing soda.

Our scoop is from old cold medicine. Usually I fill the cup about half way per load.

Why do I love this method? Because it’s easy to make, it works and it’s cheap! To make the batch 5x the original it costs roughly $11.60. That batch will last us about 6 months.

Making the detergent is the easy part of laundry. It’s the folding & putting away that drives me crazy.

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