Every year I make this bar of soap for my daughter who has excema and for me with very dry skin. It is very ugly but it works. It is called the Ugly Soap. She likes lemongrass as her fragrance and I like lavender and lemon. So the house is an aromatherapy haven at the moment.
To make soap all you need is a fat, I use sweet pasture raised lard, and a liquid (water for yesterday) and lye. The scents and added oils are extras. 
For the Ugly Soap I add oatmeal, sugar and ground coffee for exfoliation. Plus olive oil and coconut oil for extra moisturising and a little lather and Vitamin E. I tried to call it the Breakfast Bar bu it was too ugly. The Ugly Soap it is. 
My soap is made in the Slow Cooker for convenience.
And I use the stick blender to stir it to Trace.
Once we achieve trace I pour it into molds lined with plastic bags, held in place with pegs. The molds are little boxes I collect throughout the year and miniature drawers. I buy almost nothing specifically for soap making – just using whatever I find or collect.
Then the sits under the covers keeping hot for 24 hours while the chemical reaction turns the lard into scented soap. Magic really.
I cut one of the completed Ugly Soaps this morning before sunrise so you could see. They will all be cut this morning while they are still a little soft. Do you see the metal apparatus on the table? This was sent to me by my sister-in-law way back when I began making soap – it is the best soap cutter, simple and clean and precise I use it for all the loaves. When cutting a round soap I use my big butchers knife. 
Once cut the soaps sit and cure somewhere cool but dry. Usually the soap needs about four weeks to complete the cure. I store the soaps in labelled shoe boxes.
Today we are going to make another three batches, this time with milk instead of water. I have not used milk before – soap making being a winter job but I have managed to keep milking until soap making this winter. So this will be interesting! The milk adds extra fat so I am not sure how my equation will work out. They make soap with goats milk and my research tells me there is no reason why cows milk will not work?
Johns soap is on the right. He likes his plain with a Eucalyptus fragrance.
My most important tip is this site. The Brambleberry Lye and Fragrance Calculator writes each recipe for me. I enter all my precisely weighed fats, set the superfatting level to five and the equation will tell me how much lye and water to add. Then another calculator tells me how much fragrance. So far using this very precise method I have not had a failure.
It is cold this morning. 4F/-15C. There is a little bit of wind too – the WNW which is the prevailing wind here in the winter.
I hope you have a lovely day.
celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
62 responses to “The Ugly Soap”
Ouch, you have some cold weather out there! I thought we were cold here in Southern Oregon at -10 C.
Love your Ugly Soap! 😊
By the time we were hauling hay from one farm to the other it was -20C. And overcast and still. So it is staying cold all day.. c
You are so industrious! I love the thought of making soaps and I used to buy handcrafted soap bars from a local source (they no longer make soap). What happens if the soap “fails”?
You melt it down and add whichever ingredient you calculated incorrectly! Ask me how I know!!!
Or turn it into laundry liquid! c
So interesting! And the soap looks fabulous! Not ugly at all! I keep wanting to have a go at making soap. We have both the sweet pastured raised lard and goat milk (frozen though, as we dried the girls off before breeding). I’m thinking I should go ahead and do it! 🙂
I am thinking you should just go ahead too – get online and order the lye – that is the first hurdle.. c
I had an elderly cousin who made soap when I was a child in Central Kentucky. She lived in a big old dark house with a turret. And I often heard it said, Full moon tonight. Cousin Sally will be making soap. I asked how do you make soap? You need lard & lye & a big pot… I pictured her stirring her big pot by the light of the full moon in her backyard, like the old witch in Hansel & Gretel. My brother mentioned Cousin Sally when he was here visiting during the last full moon. We laughed to think of her & her big old pot & to think that the full moon was outside & of course poor old Cousin Sally was in her kitchen by the stove. You haven’t waited for the full moon, but I’ll bet your soaps will be luxe & divine.
And I just recalled a memory of wood ashes as one of the ingredients for Cousin Sally’s soap. That popped up out of the dim mists of memory, which your project has poked in my winter brain.
Your Sally must have made her own lye with the wood ash! I only ever knew one older man who did that. I am afraid of that end of the soap-making. Lye is pretty scary!
This was a long time ago, back in the late forties of the 20thc. & Cousin Sally was the only other private person I ever knew of besides Celi who made her own personal use soap. And Yes, isn’t lye notorious in poisonings & other horrible murder mysteries, cover-ups, war crimes & general evil doing? I like that it is also useful in cleansing though if the soap make is very careful & the chemistry correct.
we tried to make our own lye once – what a failure!! Cousin Sally sounds like a character in a book, I imagine her with her turret above her stirring that pot.. c
Your soap looks great. I spent 3 months studying soap chemistry and it was amazing. Where do you get your lye? If you are making it in a slow cooker, do you keep the heat on from the cooker or do you use ‘cold process’. That’s the method I was taught, though the old fashioned way of ‘hot process’ people sometimes still use and modernly in a crockpot. Just wondered which you use. Did your SIL tell you where she got her cutter? I would love something like that, so simple. I made some in which I used natural herbal coloring – soft yellow using Queen Anne’s Lace (you put the dried flowers in when dissolving the lye and let it infuse a bit) but other colors using natural materials also can be used to make it fancier. Yours looks so wonderful, I like the speckled look as well as how it must feel to use! Thanks for sharing your journey. Happy New Year. Diann Dirks, The Garden Lady of Georgia
Love homemade soap. Laura
Yes – same – and it lasts so much longer.. c
Because I wanted to begin making my own soap. Specially, goat milk soap. so he bought me some soap making supplies one year for Christmas. I have yet to attempt to make my own soap. I’m a little intimidated at the thought of using lye.
Lye is just as dangerous as spitting hot oil. Gloves and Glasses and stir carefully.. I just ban all food making while I am soap making – the kitchen becomes a laboratory with safety regulations.. c
Here in Bulgaria we have the Big Snow..all commercial vehicles have been forbidden to use the roads as if they get stuck the snow ploughs cannot do their work..so far it is 40 cms deep and more on the way…SO today we are tucked inside in the warm and l am reading about you making soap. Woman..do you ever stop? I do so admire your ability to keep working whatever the weather….how did Ugly soap get its name..surely its not really ugly?
Interesting that they MAKE the trucks stay in – that would save a lot of bother from drivers getting all gungho and ending up stuck.. c
I love this post, thanks. And I don’t think any of the soap is ugly! I imagine it is wonderful to the touch. I’m also curious where you get your lye.
Good lye you have to buy online – I get it through amazon.. c
Loved reading about your making soap! It’s so interesting. And I like how you can vary it – such as John getting his own type of soap, minus all the exfoliating stuff. GOD – it’s C.O.L.D. there… but not as cold as the woman writing from Bulgaria… YIKES!!
We are going through another cold snap – thankfully the pigs are all big enough to handle it now.. c
Your soap looks great! I never thought about using a crock pot! Great idea. We got a little bit of snow in Albuquerque! But we will be in the upper 50s by tomorrow!!
Upper 50’s sounds terribly nice right at the moment.. I hope we do not go up and down too much more or the fruit trees will start to bud – that would be bad.. c
That is amazing. I have never made soap but I do love handmade ones I sometimes buy at the local market,
I bet you get some beautiful ones in the french markets – c
Excellent – if I had the space I’d do this myself. I used to buy a really nice oatmeal soup from Boots, which after many years they stopped making. Apparently they got lots of complaints and started to make the soap again, but they changed the formula and people didn’t like it…
I remember Boots. I just made another oatmeal one today – hopefully it is a good one.. c
Good luck today with the new batches. I use my goat milk in place of water with no extra calculations, but your cow milk will have much more butter fat than mine. I hope it works out well! And your soap is definitely not ugly!
I mixed the cows milk with water 60/40 to account for the extra fat. But made no other adjustments. Goats milk would be great to have for soap – but you know how I feel about the goats. c
I sure wish your Ugly Soap was available for purchase – it sounds like just what my aged, dry, winter-chores-worn skin could use. Right now I dread getting into the shower, because no matter what “mild” commercial soap I use, my skin will be so prickly and miserable for hours afterward.