English-Italian knitting glossary with abbreviaitions

Hello folks,

I have recently decided to combine my two great passions, knitting and foreign languages, to come up with a hopefully useful glossary of knitting terms from Italian into English and vice versa. I have also added an abbreviation glossary, with English and Italian  meaning plus the Italian abbreviation (where possible). I know there are a lot of these glossaries around on the web, but I never found one that I thought was really complete and exhaustive, so I decided to make one myself, and then thought of sharing it with other knitters around the world (if you even need to knit an Italian pattern, or translate your pattern into Italian).

Please feel free to download the glossary for free HERE. The download link is found at the bottom of the post, it's in red and it's called "glossario_maglia_EN-IT".

I would really love it if you sent me your feedback on it, any omission, correction or simple suggestion would be really appreciated. To do so, you can comment this post, or drop me an email at giulia@boccaperta.com. By the way, you can use the same email address if you wish to have an xls or ods editable copy of the glossary.

About shaving soap and other experiments

I have recently spent a lot of time knitting, which I love, but don't worry, I haven't forgotten about soaps!
In fact, I believe I'm getting so much better at making soaps, especially since my last two experiments were a great success.

 Firstly, a quick update on the wonderful Fennel Winter Treat. This turned out to be probably the best soap I've made so far; with the sweet smell of organic fennel, as much shea butter as your skin needs during the cold season not to get all chopped and dry, I have been using this soap every day this season, and now I couldn’t do without it! Plus this soap turned out nicely hard and bubbly, so it won't all melt in the shower as some of my previous soaps did. I believe I found the perfect soap, or at least a very good one!

Second of all, I also made another batch of shaving soap, but this time I changed a few things. It's still curing, so I don't know whether it will be as good as the first one I made, but it smells great and with paprika I gave it an interesting orang-y look that I'm very pleased with (the picture doesn't give it justice I'm afraid).

Here it goes:

SHAVING SOAP

Olive Oil                     60%                       600g
Coconut Oil               25%                          250g
Corn Oil                      10%                        100g
Castor Oil                     5%                        50g



Distilled water: 330g
lye: 135g (5% discount)


at trace: 10g of "allume di rocca" (I think in English this is called potassium alum, it's a type of potassium salt that helps healing the small wounds one can get when shaving. You can do without it if you can't find any.);
2 teaspoons of red paprika (don't put too much of it, it might irritate the skin!)
1 tablespoon of white clay
10ml of verbena e.o. (this has a nice mixed citrus smell including orange, lemon, grapefruit and others... men love it!)

Once it's cured, you or your men can use it with a shaving brush just like the old time barbers used to do. My husband and brother use it and love it, because even if it's slightly more complicated to use (it just takes a little practice, that's all) than ready-made shaving foam, it gives a much better result, softer skin and less irritation.

E=mc2

Hi everyone,

today I'll be talking about knitting for a change.
I have recently made earwarmers for my father, who loves them.

e=mc2 Einstein earwarmers

They are not perfect, but I think they're interesting, fun and quick to knit so I decided for the first time to try and write down the pattern and share it on Ravelry.

If you wish to you can download my pattern for free here: download.

Back with a vengeance

Here I am again, I have been busy moving around, changing jobs and fighting the hot summer these months, so I haven't been able to experiment with my soaps. Also, as I mentioned before, I took up knitting, which is now another if my favourite winter evening activities. I will be posting knitting ideas, links and hopefully patterns soon in here, but for now let's keep it to the soaps.

A couple of months ago, I was finally able to make another batch of soap, since I finally got rid of most of the soap I had accumulated last winter and the weather was finally bearable so that I could take out my lye and oils and start mixing.

What I got is a nice, wonderfully smelling batch of soap full of the beneficial properties of shea butter, but also white and creamy in the lather.

Here's the recipe, as usual feel free to try it but please leave a comment if you do, and also feel free to suggest any changes/improvements!

FENNEL WINTER TREAT

fennel winter treat cp soap

olive oil           70%          650g
coconut oil      15%          200g
butterfat*        10%          121g 
shea butter        5%           50g (at trace!)

*this is common cow's milk butter, with 80% fat so I used 121g to get 100g of fat and the remaining 21g are water so I discounted the amount from the water amount

water 330 g
lye       140g (5% discount)

at trace I added the melted shea butter and 5ml of organic fennel EO plus half a teaspoon of sugar. I was also thinking that a tablespoon of white clay could make the soap harder and slightly esfoliating, but I haven't tried it.

I'm back! :)

Hello everyone!

I know you probably thought I had abandoned this blog or my crafty hobbies, but I haven't. I've just been quite busy with my personal life lately, plus I have loads of soap to use up before making some now, so that's why I haven't updated this green-y place lately.

First of all, I'd like to thank all the 15 followers who very generously read my posts and keep updated on my experiments. If you have a blog/journal/website I'll do the same, and I'm sure we can learn from each other.

Second of all, just to let you know, lately I have been putting a lot of efforts on the knitting side (since it's still way too hot here to make soap). I'm already preparing some Christmas gifts, will be posting some pictures as soon as I have something nice ready. At the moment I'm working on a pair of cotton placemats, following instructions I found on THIS BEAUTIFUL WEBSITE; which I found on the amazing Knitting Pattern Central, a real goldmine of free information and patterns for us knitters (I'm sure you're all familiar with it).

So said, I promise I'll be back soon with updates on my works, possibly new recipes or pictures of how my soaps survived to the terribly hot summer we had here this year. And in the meanwhile, I wish you all a very happy rest-of-the summer! :-)

New season, new passion: knitting

Hi everyone,

I haven't been writing here for a while, I've been very busy lately plus I have tons of soap to use and give away and no more place to store it, so I decided to give up soapmaking for a while, at least until I can make room for some new experiments!

In the meanwhile, being kinda broke and unable to keep my hands still, I took up a new, amazing obsession: knitting! I have just started, so I really suck at it right now, but I'm loving it so much, and it's a much cheaper freetime activity than soapmaking (which I love as well, of course!)... so anyway, I haven't made anything worth showing you so far, at the moment I'm practising with lace patterns and double pointed needles, but as soon as I make something at least decent, be sure you're the first to know ;)

In the meanwhile, I suggest you try knitting if you haven't yet, because it takes you back some 50-60 years, and it's so relaxing and mechanical that it feels to me much like what Buddhist monks could feel while painting mandalas.

A good idea for hot summer days

Hi everyone,

since the disaster I made HERE worked out pretty well after the rebatching, today I'd like to give you the original recipe, so that you can try it yourself if you wish. I made this one HP, but since there is Aloe Vera so the water is discounted, I would recommend to try it CP, so that you won't get the unpleasant surprise to find your soap solidified on the pot. I would say this is a perfect refreshing recipe for the summer, or for people who practice sport since it also has great antiseptic qualities.

Here we go:

MINTY FRESH

refreshing aloe vera and mint soap bar

20% olive oil                200g

45% grapeseed oil       450g

20% sweet almond oil  200g (of which 20g at trace)

10% coconut oil           100g

5% corn oil                    50g

132g lye (6% discount)

Water 225g

At trace I added: 75g of Aloe Vera (20% of the water amount), 1 tablespoon of green clay (for colouring and for a mild scrubbing effect), 20g of the sweet almond oil, tea tree (20%), eucalyptus (40%) and peppermint (40%) EOs.

My hair and my shampoo

Hi all,

this post is just to show you what I've been trying to demonstrate in the past posts. Here's a picture I took right after washing my hair with one of my solid CP shampoo bars, rinsing it with vinegar and leaving it to dry naturally without hair-dryer:

my hair washed with handmade CP shampoo

looking good?

Egg yolk shampoo

Hello folks,

in spite of all the negative comments I've read about CP shampoo, as I already discussed I simply love it, so I've been trying to make different recipes to feel the difference and choose which one is best for my hair.

The one I present today is taken from this amazing book, and modified as usual to suit my needs and the ingredients I had at hand. I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know if it's going to be any good (even though I've read many people who use it and love it), but so far it's still curing but it smells wonderful, plus it is becoming nice and hard, so I have high expectations for it. ;)

Here we go:

EGGCELLENT

egg yolk solid shampoo

74,4% olive oil                  372g
13,6% creamed coconut   100g (of which 68g of fats and 32g of water)
7% shea butter                  35g
5% wheatgerm oil             25g (at trace)
67g lye (5% discount)
118g water

at trace I added: one egg yolk mixed well and whisked with the wheat germ oil (I made it into some kind of creamy mixture), lemon, tea tree and rosemary EOs.

It took about 12 hours to become solid, but it needed a little freezer to come out of the mould. It went through gel, and it become kind of greenish after 24 hours, but in a couple of days it turned back to while-yellowish as you can see it in the picture above.

I will keep you posted on the result as soon as I try it.

Feeback on my soaps, finally!

Hello there,

I hope you're good. In these snowy days I've had a few very nice compliments for my soaps, that made me so proud and happy as if I won some kind of prize. :)

I have been giving away some of the shaving soap I made a month or so ago, and all the feedback I got was enthusiastic about how smooth and moisturised it leaves the skin compared to commercial shaving foam or soap, how lovely and creamy its lather is and so on. I had a chance to see it myself, when my husband-to-be tried it: when he shaves, his neck generally becomes cherry-red and takes a good few hours to go back to normal, but the two times he shaved with my handmade shaving soap, he didn't get red at all! Plus his skin felt so soft and relaxed I almost couldn't believe it. My brother and father, who also tried it, gave me the same feedback, so I think I'll make some more of it soon, maybe with some eucalyptus or mint EO to make it a bit refreshing and antiseptic.

Also, I have one of my friends asking me for more soap, since with the commercial soap she used before she said she always had dry skin and had to put on her body and hand loads of lotion to make it better, but since she uses my karité and wheat germ oil soaps she doesn't even need lotion anymore!

I know all you soapers know what these first positive feedbacks feel like... I just canpt wait to make and give away some more soap!!! LOL.

Wish you all a good and hopefully relaxing weekend.

A failed batch... and how I (hopefully) saved it.

Oh, well, a failed batch happens every now and then, it's part of the game and when it does, I always try to think positively about all the things I can learn from it instead of complaining or getting sad.

This time, I tried to make an Aloe Vera refreshing soap, scented with mint and eucalyptus. I wanted to make it HP, so that the strong, fresh scent of mint could stay almost intact in the final soap. WRONG! The problem is, with Aloe Vera you have to count it as part of your water, so you kind of have to discount water from the lye solution, in order to make up for the water in the Aloe juice, which is what I did. I also used a high percentage of unsaturated fats to make the soap softer and justify the absence of part of the water (20% to be precise). Well, it didn't work. I made my soap and brought it to trace as usual, then stuck it in the oven at 50°C for 20 mins, as usual. I took it out to stir a little, and it looked awesome, so I switched off the oven and put the soap back in for another 20 mins... but when I took it out again it was very solid, extremely difficult to mix with the remaining ingredients and way too hard to pour it into a mould!!! DISASTER!!!

In a panic attack, I decided to try to incorporate the EOs and aloe juice anyway, hoping that, mixing like crazy, I could have made it into a fairly homogeneous mix... and I thought I kind of did it, but when I tried to unmould the thing, I was horrified to be presented with this ugliness:

failed batch of HP soap

I didn't know exactly what to do with it, it smelled so good I didn't want to just throw it away, so I decided, after careful consideration, to keep a couple of pieces as samples, and to rebatch the whole thing immediately, to see if the soap would mix a little better. So I cut it into small chunks and put it on a very low heat in my soap pot:

rebatching failed HP soap

I added 1/2 cup of aloe juice and heated it up until melted (it only took a few minutes. Then I added again a few drops of EOs, just in case some evaporated in the heating process. I poured it into a mould and let it cool down, then as usual I froze it for about un hour, took it out, unmoulded and cut, and what I got now is this:

rebatched and saved aloe soap!

It's now very soft because of the extra Aloe jiuce, and as you can see, it's not completely smooth, but I'm hoping it's at least usable. I have to say it smells great, so I'm really hoping it turns out something nice for the hot summer days. I'll keep you posted on this one.

Fragrance oils or essential oils?

This is the big dilemma that many soapmakers have to face when starting to make soap. Go for the cheap, inexhaustible synthetic fragrance oils (FOs), which can have any smell you like and cost 1/2 or even 1/10 of their natural counterpart, or stick to the more natural but sometimes unbelievably costly essential oils (EOs)?

I have to say I haven't found an answer to the riddle. Pros of EOs are, of course, their very natural and delicious smells, the beneficial proprieties they carry (which are the proprieties of the plants they are extracted from), that can be passed on to the soap, as well as the fact that they make a all around, 100% natural soap. Cons are of course the difficulty to find some rare, expensive scents, the sometimes unbelievably high price and the the fact that you surely have less choice compared to FOs.

On the other hand, pros of FOs are the opposite: you have a potentially infinite choice of smells and blends, you can find anything you want, from green apple to black pepper, and they all have the same, generally low price. But on the other hand, sometimes there could be incompatibilities with the skin, since many of these FOs aren't made for the skin. Plus some of them could make the soap seize in the pot, and what's most important they don't give to soap that nice, natural smell that only EOs can have. Plus they don't carry any property, and they make your soap a little less natural.

Of course, I would rather use 100% only EOs, but since I'm no billionaire, and soapmaking for me is just a hobby and not a business, so far I've stuck to a simple rule: I use EOs for the fragrances that are cheap enough not to make me want to cry when I buy them (these include lavender, eucalyptus, lemon, tea tree, rosemary, ylang-ylang, sage, pine, mint etc.), and FOs for the rest, especially for sweet or flowery smells, whose EOs can cost up to 30-40€ for 10ml!! So I've made soaps that smell like vanilla, rose or jasmine, which unfortunately all contain FOs. Plus I've decided I'll keep looking on the internet until I find a good, inexpensive EOs retailer where to buy my EOs... and if I do find it, maybe I'll be able to stick to EOs only.

In the meanwhile, the refreshing Aloe Vera, eucalyptus and mint soap I'm making is almost ready, so I'd better go and check on it!

Another shampoo recipe

Hello everyone,

first of all I would like to thank all the lovely people who passed by to read some of this blog, I didn't expect so many of you to read about my soapmaking experiments, so I have been very pleasantly surprised. I hope you like what you read, and that it makes you want to come back and read more. ;)

A part from this, today I've made another batch of shampoo, this time it's egg yolk CP solid shampoo. I took a recipe from a very useful book I own, and changed it for practical reasons (the original recipe includes bees wax, which I don't have, and plus I wanted to customize it a little, which is where most of the fun lies in soapmaking!). I will be posting the recipe and results probably in a few weeks, that is when the shampoo is cured and ready to be tested.

In the meanwhile, I wanted to share with you another shampoo recipe I found  on the same book mentioned above. Once again, I customized the recipe - which came out quite good but a little too soft. Even so, the friend I gave it to, who has pretty greasy and thick hair, loved it, and now wants more, so here's the recipe as I modified it (or you can try the original version from the book if you wish, it might be even better).

NATURAL WONDERBAR

65% olive oil

15% sweet almond oil

9% coconut oil

6% castor oil

3% linseed oil

2% wheatgerm oil (at trace)

lye (5% discount, but fore greasy hair I would recommend even 3%)

water infused with stingy nettles (fresh or dried) and rosemary

at trace I added the wheatgerm oil plus some tea tree and rosemary essential oils, previously mixed with a tablespoon (for 1 kg of basic fats) of rice flour as fixative.

Sorry, I don't have pictures for this one, but as I said it came out quite soft but very cleansing and gentle with the hair. Probably playing around a little with the percentages, or using less water - or again the HP method - maybe you could get a harder, better soap. I am going to try this one again in the future, maybe with less water and see how it comes out.

In the meanwhile, I've given a a birthday present some of my soaps to friends, so I'm really impatient to hear their feedback on it, especially on the beer soap I've very happily made and use myself. Fingers crossed!

Rebatching disaster!

My goodness, the batch of white base I made last week was so awesome I was sorry I had to rebatch it... but now I'm even more sorry! 

The rebatching I did so for did not turn out very well, unfortunately. I tried with some herbal teas to see if the final soap had at least vaguely the smell of the tea (this worked with a red berries tea I tried some time ago!!), but nothing. This time I tried with chamomile tea and with fennel tea. The soap I rebatched with fennel smells very vaguely like it, but the chamomile nothing at all. :(

Plus the soaps are so very soft, I don't know how long it'll take them to become hard enough to be usable. Actually, they look ok, but they don't smell at all and are way too soft. I used different water amounts for both. On one I used half the aount of soap in water, and on the other I used the same amount. The first batch did not melt very well and turned out a bit lumpy, that's why I tried the 1:1 proportion. That was good for the melting, the soap melted nicely and became smooth and easy to be poured in the moulds, but as I just said both batches turned out a little too soft, I suppose. I'll give it a few weeks and see.

Next time I'll try to infuse the basic oils, and see the result, even though I've read that it doesn't keep the smell for long. I will also be trying (probably today or tomorrow) a kiwi fruit rebatching that I found on a book. The author of the book doesn't add any colouring or FOs to it, so I'm guessing the kiwi will leave a pleasant smell and colour to it. I know this will mean a shorter shelf life for the soap, but just for trying I'll do this with a very small amount of soap, something like 100g or so.

I guess I still have to learn a lot about rebatching...

Honey & cinnamon layered soap

Hello folks,

today I'd like to share with you a HP recipe that I made up taking the base oils from another one I tried some time ago, and basically changing the extra ingredients. I oven-processed this batch (for instructions on oven processed soap, please refer to this), so it's already usable and it is maintaining the deliciously sweet smell of honey after a few weeks. I've tried it already, and it has a wonderful and quick lather, a very nice smell and it leaves my skin soft and moisturised. So, here we go:

BEE GOOD


45% olive oil
20% coconut oil
10% rice bran oil
5% castor oil

lye 5% discount

cow's milk 375g per kg of base oils (you could use goat's milk on the same amount)

Bee good honey and cinnamon layered soap

I made the soap as usual, freezing 2/3 of the milk to mix with the lye (for instructions on how to make milk soap, please refer to this) and separating the remaining 1/3 into two parts. I mixed one part of the not-frozen milk with a teaspoon of freshly ground cinnamon and half a teaspoon of cocoa powder, and I put the other half to warm up a little and mixed it with a tablespoon of honey. Then at thin trace I separated the batch into two, and on the smaller one I added the cocoa-cinnamon-milk mixture, whereas to the other half I added the milk-honey mix, of course. Then I poured one first and then the other in the mould as usual, and let it sit for 12 hours before unmoulding.

Sustainability of soap ingredients

Hi again,

today I'd like to raise a little awareness on the sustainability of the ingredients we use to make our lovely soaps. As you can see from the new look of this blog, I care a lot about the environment and the sustainability issue is what made me start soaping in the first place. The idea of showering, bathing and cleaning with something that not only is pleasant, but that also is 100% biodegradable and nice to our beloved and only Earth is something that makes me very proud and the reason why I keep soapmaking up.

First of all, stay clear as much as possible of PALM OIL!!! There are tons of reasons for this, and I know it's sad because palm oil makes great soaps, but do we really want our soaps to be cause of so much trouble??
personally, I prefer to use olive oil or rice barn oil, which are cheap and I know are locally produced. Plus they make a great soap too! I wish I could avoid coconut oil too, but it adds so much to the soap that I can't avoid using a bit on some batches. Even so, I always try to use the smaller percentage possible, so that the environmental footprint is at its least.

Secondly, let's talk about organic ingredients. As I've read in many places, nowadays buying "organic"-marked products doesn't necessarily mean that that product is made reducing its carbon footprint or the damages its production causes to the environment. Actually, the label and the certifying bodies most often than not unreliable (that's what taught me a friend working on quality control in one of Italy's biggest food retailers in the country), thus buying organic and sustainable products has become much more complicated than buying organic marked products. 

So how do we do it? Well, I'm no guru on this matter, but what I generally do (which is pretty simple) is I check where the product came from - the nearer the better, since it means less transportation therefore less pollution. I always try to buy season fruit and vegetables, so that they don't need heating or other polluting and unnatural means to be grown - plus they taste better and are cheaper. For example, I don't buy fresh tomatoes in winter or oranges during summer. And of course I try to grow my own vegetables, I have a small balcony, where I keep all the pots and stuff to grow peppers, tomatoes, aubergines, herbs and other things during summer. I love to do it, plus they taste sooo good after you've made so much effort into growing them, lol!

One last thing I do, is I try to buy from farmers or retailers I know, and I buy local milk so that I know it didn't come from far away. And lastly, for the things I really can't find here, I go to the natural shop and buy them there. They may be not as "organic" as I hope, but I believe they are still a bit better and greener than what you can get at a general discount supermarket.

I'm sure you have load of better ideas, and you can also check the green living section for more links and ideas on this subject. The important point I wanted to stress here is: think about it before you buy, think about all the chemicals and pollution the things you put into your soap could have, that could end up in your and your friend's skin.... and buy wisely! ;)

Updates on the soap base experiment

I am so proud of the recipe I made up for the soap base to rebatch that I couldn't resist from taking some pictures to show you how it turned out. Probably from only these stupid pictures you can't see how compact and beautiful this soap looks, but believe me it is a pleasure to look at (at least for a soapmaker!), and it bubbles like crazy! The only thing is, it still smells like cheese, but I'm sure the smell will fade away with curing.

So, here it is... (I placed it on a white cloth so that you can see the actual colour it got after gelling)

I am so happy about not only because I made up the recipe myself, but especially because it is made mainly of olive oil and butter (cow's milk butter), which are very cheap and easy to find ingredients around here.

So, if anyone of you want to try it, here's the recipe of my lovely buttermilk soap. Well, before giving you the recipe I have to stress the fact that I did a different calculation at the beginning, but then I realized I didn't have enough butter, but I had already mixed my lye to the water so I had to re-calculate the fats in order to obtain the same lye amount and discount. So the percentages are a bit crazy, and if you ever decide to try it I suggest you use slightly different percentages to make them easier to calculate... but, of course, in any case I can't guarantee any result!

Other thing you have to be very careful about is the butter amount. I know in some countries it is quite difficult to get pure cow's milk butter. What is sold as "butter" is in fact a blend of animal and vegetable fats. In that case, I recommend you not to use it on your soaps, because the SAP calculation would be too difficult, and generally you have no way to know the percentage of each fat in the butter. But if you can actually get a 100% cow's milk butter, then it gets easier. The only thing you have to take into consideration is the percentage of butterfat in it. As an example, I use a 82% butterfat butter, meaning that in each 100g of butter there are 82g of butterfat and 20g of water. I round that 82 to 80, and when I put the recipe through a lye calculator, I am careful to only input the actual amount of butterfat in the butter, and to calculate the remaining water as part of the liquid in my soap. So, as an example, if I want to have 100g of butterfat in my soap, I would add 125g of butter (if my butter is 80% butterfat), and when calculating the water or liquid amount, I would take away the 25g of water in the it, so say I have to add 100g of water, I would only add 75g, because there are already 25g in the butter. 

I hope this is clear.....

Anyway, here's the recipe:


A Cow's Treat (a.k.a. Burrone --> this is its Italian name)

71% olive oil          710g
14% butterfat        (172g of butter, of which 136g butterfat and 36g water)
10% coconut oil    100g
5% castor oil         50g

lye (discount 3%)
water

at trace I added about 90g of fresh cream, and if you want to use it straight away without rebatching I suggest you add some deodorizing EOs like lemon, eucalyptus or mint.

As I said, don't worry if it smells like cheese for the first few days (or maybe even weeks), I've tried soap with butterfat before and, especially if you make it HP, after a few weeks of cure the smell fades away.

I am now sorry I didn't put any EOs in it, because it would have made a wonderful soap in itself, without need for rebatching. Anyway, I will be rebatching soon, and posting the results in here, I'm curious to see if it will maintain this consistency even after the rebatching process.

Basic soap base for re-batching

After the success of the very berry re-batching experiment, I decided to try to make re-batched chamomile, lime-blossom and fennel soap, so that I can use the wonderful herbal teas I have instead of spending a lot of money on EOs. So I decided to make a batch of "neutral" white unscented soap base, and then rebatch it with these herbal teas, and maybe try to colour it as well, or do so swirls. So that's what I did yesterday.

For my soap base I used mainly olive oil (my favourite and one of the cheapest you can find here), with some 14% butterfat and a little coconut and castor oils for lather. I used a very low lye discount (3%) so that I can later add some extra oils while rebatching without getting a oily soap. I made up the recipe myself, so I'm not quite sure of the result. If it comes out well, I'll be posting it here.

I did it CP, and I added some fresh cream at light trace, to see if I get a richer lather and a creamier soap.

EDIT: I have just unmoulded it and I was impressed by how easily it came perfectly out of the mould. I cut it and it looks so good I'm sorry I have to rebatch it!! It looks firm but creamy, a yellowish colour (I suspect it kind of overheated yesterday night while wrapped in my old blanket to gel).
I'll probably be rebatching it before it gets completely cured, maybe in a week or so, so that hopefully it is still quite soft and easy to melt down without all the lumps. We'll see.

Thank you Nancy Today!

I simply love her videos, and wish one day I can have the time and space to experiment and make as much soap and other crafts as she does! When I first saw this video I thought: wow, I want to have all those racks full of nice-smelling and colourful soaps one day too... :-)

Unfortunately my flat is too small to have a room just for soaping (sigh!), that means that every time I make soap I have to get all the equipment and oils out from a cupboard where I store them, and then when I finish I have to clean up and put everything away again, which is starting to get annoying. 

That's why I hope one day I can have a soap-making room as Nancy has, or just a room corner would do - that's my secret countryside living daydream!

Enjoy the video and dream about soap heaven with me.... :D

My experience with shampoo bars

Hello folks,

today I'd like to share with you my own experience with another "controversial" topic on soapmaking: CP shampoo bars.

Now, I've read a lot on the internet before deciding to make a shampoo bar. Some people say they can't use CP soap as shampoo, others swear they've been using it for a while and they love it, and some other want you to believe that even thinking about CP shampoo is crazy.

I have also read a lot of different opinions on how to properly make it, what lye discount to use and what oils are best for the hair. One common opinion seems to be that olive oil is the best for it's gentle conditioning qualities, and that some coconut and castor oils are a must since a shampoo is expected to make a lot of creamy and frothy bubbles. I suppose there are so many different opinions because, with hair even more so than with skin, the final effect depends not only on the soap itself, but on the type of hair, of weather and of final result we have and want. So I am here to add a bit more to this debate by bringing my own personal experience.

I have always been intrigued by the possibility of making my own shampoo and stop putting all those awful chemicals on my poor, thin, dry hair. So as soon as I came across a shampoo recipe that seemed feasible and logical (I found it on this book, which I strongly recommend to anyone making CP soap because it contains so much useful information!), and didn't even include coconut oil, so I tried it!

The book suggests to use beer for thin and dry hair, because it naturally strengthen the hair and makes it nice and shiny, so here's the beer shampoo recipe I tried (as usual, slightly changed from the one on the book):
 

DRUNKEN MASTER

the drunken master beer shampoo

55% olive oil

15% rice bran oil

10% sweetcorn oil (to add at trace)

10% castor oil

5% linseed oil

lye (7% discount, but this depends on your hair type)

2/3 distilled or rain water and 1/3 "condensed" beer

at trace I added: the sweetcorn oil, rosemary and eucalyptus e.o. and a teaspoon of henna powder (which I've read is another natural conditioner).

As regards the "condensed" beer, that's how I did it: I took about double the amount of beer I needed, put it in a small pot and let it sit for a while to get rid of all the gas it contains. Then I added 1/2 teaspoon of table salt and put it at a low heat for about 10 minutes, or anyway until I could feel it had halved the volume (and it starts getting a little thick). Then I let it cool down and added it to the soap right after the lye and water mixture - or you could add it at trace if you wish.

The result is a pretty soft soap that takes a while to become un-mouldable, and about 6-8 weeks to cure. I used it for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and have been washing my hair with it ever since. I have to say that the feeling with chemical shampoos is very different, and that - as I've read in many different places - since the CP soap pH value is pretty high, it is best to use an acid rinse after the CP soap on hair. So I prepared a bottle with one cup of vinegar and about 3-4 cups of water, plus 3-4 drops of rosemary e.o. that I shake and use  to rinse my hair every time I wash them with my beer shampoo.

The result so far is stunning. I have to say my hair get greasy quite easily now compared to normal (as when I use a lot of conditioner or when I have my hair washed by the hairdresser!), so I have to wash them every 2 days or so, but that's probably because I need a lower lye discount (I'll try with 5% on the next batch), but other that that they feel SO AMAZING!!! They are so shiny and strong, I never had such beautiful hair with any chemical shampoo, ever. My partner even noticed it, and some of my friends too, asked me what I'm doing to my hair that they look so nice and different.

After this first experiment, I think I'll stick to CP shampoo bars, and will try experimenting a bit more with them. I've read of someone who doesn't discount lye at all, and then adds 3% jojoba oil at trace, so that the only "free" oil in the final soap is jojoba, which is really similar to the skin natural oil. I'll try that too, I think.

Other great ingredients for you shampoos could be egg yolks (I've read they are a miracle for thin and weak hair, so I'm gonna try that one too), chamomile (for fair or blonde hair), rosemary (for dark hair), stingy nettle for the scalp and tea tree e.o. for an antiseptic and cleansing shampoo or for dandruff.

I can't wait to try all of these things, and I think I'll get some of my friends to try it too, even though I fear they are too used to chemical shampoos to appreciate the initially weird feel of natural hair. We'll see.