I fell in love. I had no idea the dark hole of essential oils I had just fallen down.
A couple months later, and well my house started smelling a lot less like dog and a lot more like lavender.
Like just about every interest of mine, one thing leads to another so why stop with basic aromatherapy? Massage oil, bath salts, body butter, lotion bars, and lip balm were soon to follow, which turned into many hours browsing natural beauty product recipes on Pinterest. And once you start pinning sugar scrubs, well Pinterest will start showing you all the beautiful natural soap pictures. So there you have it. My yarn is being neglected due to Whole Foods and Pinterest.
As much as I wanted to make my own soap, lye scared the hell out of me. Hazardous! Toxic! Must use safety equipment! Um, thanks, I'll pass. I tried making melt-and-pour soap, where you buy a block of soap base, melt it, add color, fragrance, texture, whatever, and voila..soap. Only the soap sort of sucked, and I went back to dreaming about making real soap from scratch. I read a dozen tutorials and pinned a ton of pretty soap pictures. But I'm a wimp when it comes to hazardous chemicals that could burn the crap out of me and was never brave enough to attempt the scary lye process on my own.
A trip to Atlanta to visit family and a natural soap shop that offers classes finally solved my problem. My sister wanted to take the class too and we convinced my mom to go to meet the 3-person class minimum, and boom, awesome family outing + someone to hold my hand while I mix lye. Win, win!
Measuring oils:
Listening to the lye instructions. Safety equipment? Check.
Final mixing!
End result? Lovely lavender oatmeal soap.
Also, I'm not afraid of lye anymore. Oh, this is happening.
To be continued...
