Soap Making

Lately I've been wanting to do more DIY stuff. We already cook almost everything from scratch, and I want to start applying that mentality to the rest of my life. So I decided that I would make soap.  

Because it was my first soap-making adventure, I decided to get the melt and pour soap. I think in the future I'll come up with my own soap base, but this works for now. I got the goat's milk soap base. 

I made two kinds of soap. One was Chai Oatmeal and the other was Lavender Honey Oatmeal. I added coconut oil to the chai soap, and olive oil to the lavender soap (I did the chai first, and the coconut was a bit too fragrant, so I used olive oil in the lavender). It was so easy! I just melted it on the stove top, added however much oatmeal, honey, lavender, etc., I thought was good, and poured it into a loaf pan. 

It only took about 11/2 hours to solidify. 

The chai soap is on the left, and the lavender is on the right. 

Both of them smell amazing. The chai one will be perfect for fall and winter and smells just like a chai latte. 

The best part about my experiment? The price. The soap base was about $10 at Michael's (they gave me a coupon discount so it ended up being less than that). I picked up some lavender there for another $3, but only used about 1/4 of what I bought. Other than that, everything else I used I had at home. Each loaf made about 6 bars of soap. It comes out to about $1.60 per bar. In stores, a bar of moisturizing soap is $4-$6! Much cheaper and more natural to DIY!