Making all natural soap at home using fresh garden herbs instead of the more expensive essential oils. When making soap, you generally need a lot of essential oil for each batch. This drives up the cost of your soap considerably.
We have an herb garden just loaded with fresh herbs and I figured I could just use the herbs instead of essential oil. What I did is to make a concentrated herbal tea out of the crushed fresh herbs.
I prepared my homemade soap as usual using my old time tested recipe. You can read the recipe here: http://www.thedoityourselfworld.com/articles/article.php?id=3419
I usually double or triple the batch for larger quantities of soap. On our homestead we use our homemade soap for bathing, hand washing, laundry, dishes and more. It is very versatile and can be used anywhere a detergent or soap is needed. For laundry you just shave off some of the soap into the washing machine and wash as usual.
Many people say that using homemade soap to wash clothes gets them so much cheaner. You can try it for yourself.
I took the water quantity that I needed for the soap recipe and just put that into a blender with the fresh herbs. I blended the herbs up to a fine mush. Then I strained the tea to get the herbal solids out.
I used this herbal tea in place of water in my soap making recipe. It smelled so good while cooking down.
Later, just before you pour the soap into molds, you can put the solids back into the soap mixture and stir it in well. This gives you more of the herbal essence and some extra benefits of the whole herb as well. It also gives your soap some color and texture.
And that is all.
You can watch the video here:
Please Subscribe & follow my daily YouTube videos
Read my articles at The Do It Yourself World