see.homemade

tonight was busy. im am getting really excited for Mike's arrival and so I am putting all this excited energy to use... I finished and jarred the marmalade and whipped out a batch of lavender soap. Needless to say it smelled amazing in my little shoe box of an apartment. I wish my blog had a scratch and sniff feature. Here are some pictures of my busy evening and fyi, it takes at least 24 hours for soap to harden up just right to cut and about 1 month to actually be safe to use. One of the main ingredients in soap is sodium hydroxide aka lye.
Lye is really nasty stuff, once combined with water it immediately heats to almost 200 degrees!! It is strange to put such a seemingly toxic substance into my precious natural soap but once it meets and combines with its fat or oil counterpart they bind together and the Lye mellows out. I love chemistry... le sigh.