How to make soap, extract essential oil & hydrosol

Class Detail

We will make oil and hydrosol from seasonal plant material, either lavender, eucalyptus, rosemary, or some other seasonal herb or foliage. This class will be divided between two activities: 1. soap making, 2. essential oil and hydrosol distillation.

Each student will work in pairs.

Soap Making

I will teach you how to:

Work with lye and I’ll explain why lye is a key soap making ingredient

How to use and understand online soap making calculators to create your own recipes

I’ll explain superfatting, liquid and soap bars

How to use and create moulds

Cold vs hot process soap making

Why Melt & Pour is not a soap making process

How to use natural pigments such as cacao, turmeric and clays.

How to use essential oils

You will take home a beautiful gift pack with two soap bars made from a previous class and a gorgeous bottle of hydrosol.

This class will equip you with the knowledge to create soap from oils and fats of your choice. Soap can be made from over 100 oils and fats, combined in different percentages to create a soap with the qualities you desire. It also allows you to make soap using ingredients readily available to you, locally made and with the greatest accountability.

Please note that it is not possible to make soap just from goats milk or any other milk for that matter. If a soap statues it is made from goats milk, it means that the water used to dissolve the lye was replaced by milk. However, oils either vegetable or animal are the key ingredients and the milk fraction is only a tiny % of the recipe.

While it is possible to make soap from Milk Fat, it is very hard to find an accessible source of high quality Milk Fat (you can’t make soap from butter). I am sorry to say that commercial soap makers are very misleading when they say their soap is made from milk. Milk can be incorporated in the process as the ‘water component’ of the lye mixture but you will be hard pressed to find a recipe that calls for 100% of the ‘oils’ to be milk.

It is possible to make soap from shea butter, or cocoa butter, but not from the butter we spread on our toast.

Essential Oil Distillation 

The process is really simple, it’s the equipment that is the hard part… finding out where to get distilling equipment and how to access it and how to pay for it. Once you have the equipment and some guidelines, distilling is an incredibly beautiful and simple process.

This class is really wonderful because

What makes this class special is that we will make essential oil and use that oil in the soaps we make, using plants grown on my property! That kind of circular crafting is the kind of crafting that I love the most! And the other really special component of this class is that you will be walked through the principles of soap making and shown online tools that empower you to take charge. I will give you a recipe and will show you how I created that recipe but more importantly I will teach you how to create your own recipes!

I look forward to meeting you!

Arrivederci! Cari amici! Mara