I try to wear rubber gloves when I clean the house and do dishes, especially in the winter. If I don’t, I find that the skin on my hands pretty much just falls off. However, after an hour of steamy dishes I often find that the gloves don’t really want to come off.
The solution? Switch the water to cold and run your hands underneath for a few seconds. Easy peasy lemon squeezy, the gloves come off!
I like to learn one big major skill in DIY every holiday season and turn it into my showcase gift for friends and family. This year, the Pie and I learned how to make soap, from scratch. There are four main methods of soap preparation:
Melt and pour: basically you get a kit containing a block of solid soap, goat’s milk, glycerin, whatever, and some nice moulds and you melt the soap in the microwave, mix it with pretty flowers, and pour it into the moulds. You may recall a disastrous outcome we had once with one of these kits. They are, however, super trendy right now and many DIY bloggers have instructions on making pretty layered soaps and things.
Hand-milling: more or less a fancier version of melt-and-pour, in that you grate up a bunch of super nice soaps, melt them down, add things to them, and then chuck them in a mould.
Cold process: This is the from-scratchiest way to make soap, wherein you combine specific oils with a lye solution and cause the chemical reaction that leads to saponification. SCIENCE! Of course this is the version we did. Do not do this process with small children, as it is quite dangerous. To start, I began with the very clear and simple instructions I found on Garden Therapy.
Hot process: Essentially the same as cold process, except you speed things up by “cooking” the soap, usually in a slow cooker. We did a bit of this with one of the batches that didn’t turn out right the first time.
Safety Equipment
Lye is an extremely strong chemical, and you’re using it in a pretty violent reaction in this DIY, so safety should be your number one priority. Lye can burn or blind you and inhaling its fumes is a really bad idea as well. You must, therefore, have good quality safety goggles (the kind that touch your face all around) and some strong rubber gloves with long sleeves.
Wear long sleeved shirts and long pants, and make sure to wear shoes while you do this. If you have a chemical ventilator, I recommend you use it as well. This one cost me about thirty bucks at Home Depot and it’s great.
Keep a large amount of white vinegar handy. The acid in the vinegar will neutralize the strong base of the lye should you happen to spill it on yourself.
Work in an area as well that has access to fresh air either through a window or a fume hood (the first time we did this I went outside). I do not want to feel responsible for you people if you die while doing one of my DIYs. So please behave yourselves and BE CAREFUL!
Non-Chemical Equipment
You need a lot of stuff for soap-making that doesn’t necessarily tie into ingredients and/or safety equipment.
You’ll need at least 3 heatproof bowls (glass or metal, doesn’t really matter), and at least 3 silicone spatulas. I should also note that once you use these tools to make soap you probably shouldn’t use them in connection with food anymore, so plan accordingly. I used old spatulas I was going to throw out and/or picked up at the Dollar Store, and bowls I grabbed from Value Village for a few dollars each.
You’ll need a double boiler or access to a microwave. I prefer using a double boiler because it’s easier to measure temperatures that way.
You also need a highly accurate scale and thermometer. For that reason, a digital scale and digital instant read thermometer are probably best.
If your scale is super tiny, like mine is, you’ll also need some wee dishes for measuring your oils. If you have a big one, you can measure your oils all together in one big bowl.
You need something to put your soap in when it’s ready. You can use all sorts of fancy actual soap moulds for this, but the amounts I used in the recipes below produce enough soap to fill a 1L (~1qt) milk carton, which has a nice non-stick interior. Just make sure you wash and dry the carton carefully first.
Also handy will be a set of old towels or blankets for wrapping the soap cartons.
Not shown, but that is more or less necessary, is an immersion blender (again, you can’t use it again for food, but you can buy a new one off Amazon for twenty bucks). I dedicated my old one to the cause and bought a shiny new one for myself.
You may also need a wide mouth canning funnel, for pouring your soap mixture into your cartons. You might not need it, depending on how steady your hand is, but I found it very useful.
Soap-Making Ingredients
Now we’re getting down to business. Soap at its most basic is composed of oil/fat and lye. That’s it. How you put those together is up to you. So you’ll need assorted oils (vegetable, castor, olive, coconut, etc.) to get you started. I recommend doing a little bit of research into the different properties of each oil and what they do before you make your selections. I found this article to be particularly helpful.
To “flavour” your soaps you will also need an assortment of essential oils and some dried and ground herbs. The essential oils will add your desired scent while the dried herbs will add texture, and ground herbs will contribute to colour. Here is a handy list of ingredients that will change the appearance of your soap.
Very importantly, you’ll need some distilled water. Use distilled over filtered or tap water simply because the varying mineral compositions in undistilled water will make your results unpredictable.
Equally important is lye. That’s what makes the magic happen. For solid soap, you want to get yourself sodium hydroxide (potassium hydroxide is used for liquid soaps). Get the lye that comes in free-flowing crystals or pellets – they’re easier to measure and less likely to get everywhere.
For those Canadians who don’t have access to specialty soap suppliers, you can purchase lye at Home Hardware.
And the final magic ingredient you will need is a LYE CALCULATOR. I found the SoapCalc to be helpful and easy to use (and it’s free). There’s also a handy link in the top menu that explains all the calculations. Basically, you begin by figuring out how much soap you want to produce – for our purposes, 700g soap fits in a 1L milk carton. From there you calculate what percentages of oils you want to go into your soap, and then the software will do the calculations to tell you the exact measurements of oil, lye, and water that you will need. And then it tells you the quality of soap you will produce with those numbers. And it does it in metric AND imperial. Then you can print it out and keep it handy. I love things that do math for me.
The Cold Process Process:
Once you get the hang of this (i.e., like me, you do it five or six times in a row), it’s super easy – you just have to pay attention so you don’t hurt yourself and make sure your measurements are accurate. One of the most important things you need to do first is measure out your raw ingredients as accurately as possible.
You’ll notice in this, our first batch, that we used olive oil as one of our ingredients. Olive oil, we learned later, is hard to make into soap because it doesn’t always form a trace (you’ll see in a little bit what we mean), so we actually had a lot of trouble with this first batch. But that’s good for you guys, because I can show you how we fixed it. And we had no problems with any subsequent batch. Anyway, keep measuring out your ingredients. Accuracy is key.
When all your ingredients are ready and laid out (this includes the water for your lye solution and all your flavourings), then you can put all the oils together (except for the scented ones) and start gently heating them in your double boiler with one of your heatproof bowls.
A note on temperature: Always, always, ALWAYS make sure that your oils and your lye solution are the same temperature when you mix them together. This is very important. Every recipe differs, as will the humidity levels and relative temperatures of your environment, but generally you are aiming for an ideal temperature of between 110° and 120°C for both your oils and your lye solution. They don’t have to be exactly the same, but in that range would be best.
So, once your oils reach about 120°-125°C (I like to get them hot and let them cool a bit while I do the next step), you can work on your lye solution.
Take another one of your heatproof bowls and fill it partially with water and ice to create an ice bath. Set that aside for a moment. Measure out your room-temperature distilled water into your third heatproof bowl and have your lye crystals measured and at hand. Do this in a well-ventilated area. As I mentioned above, the first time we did this I sat on our balcony in the fresh air. In subsequent times I just put everything on top of the stove and did it with the window cracked and the stove fan going at full blast. But this looks way more dramatic.
When you’re ready, grab one of your spatulas and your lye crystals and ever-so-slowly pour the lye into the distilled water. SLOWLY. Stir gently the whole time.
At first it will look like nothing is happening. I feel like my neighbours were suspicious at this point.
But then the lye will start to dissolve and the water will turn cloudy and begin to steam. DO NOT INHALE THIS STEAM. IT IS NOT GOOD STEAM.
Make sure to get every last crystal into the solution.
Continue to stir the solution until it starts to clear, then take its temperature. The lye/water reaction means the liquid will get really hot, really fast. You want to cool the lye solution down to the same 110-120 range as the oils, and that’s what the ice bath is for. Feel free to use it (because we were doing this particular batch outside in November, it didn’t take long for it to cool).
When the lye solution and the oils are the same approximate temperature, you can add them together. Slowly. Stirring the whole time. And ALWAYS add the lye to the oils, not the other way around.
Now you keep stirring. Only crazy people do this by hand because it can take up to four hours for this stuff to start working. Use your immersion blender in thirty-second bursts to emulsify the mixture. There is some spatter involved, so make sure you’re still wearing all your safety equipment. I find it useful to do the blending with the bowl sitting in my empty sink. What you’re looking for – and this may take a while – is what is called “trace”. This is when the mixture thickens and starts to resemble pudding, and when you drip a bit of the mixture on top of itself (like it falls off the blender back into the bowl), you can see the trace of the drip on the surface). At this point, you have to act quickly (hence the blurry shot).
Now you add in your solids and your essential oils and blend it up again.
Pour your new almost-soap into your milk carton and tape down the top. Wrap it in a towel and put it somewhere warm (like on top of your fridge or near a heating vent) for 48 hours. The carton will feel warm and then actually hot over the next little while as the saponification occurs.
Neutralize your dirty dishes with vinegar before you wash them. And keep your gloves on while you do it, just to be safe.
Now, sometimes, you don’t get a trace, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes this means you weren’t mixing hard enough (so that’s why you use an immersion blender). Sometimes the temperature isn’t right – the ingredients don’t have the same temperature, or they’ve cooled too much. If you are having trouble achieving trace, try putting the bowl back on the double boiler and heating it up a little more again. And if that doesn’t work, then just shove it into the carton anyway, and hope for the best. You’ll know in 48 hours if it worked or not. In this case, the olive oil combo we used, combined with our inexperience and inexpert technique, meant that when I ripped open the carton 48 hours later I had a chunk of soap and then a bunch of oozy liquid. Always wear your gloves when you open a mould, just in case something like this happens. There’s no way of knowing how much of that liquid is reactive lye.
But this is fixable! Just mush it all up (newly saponified soap is very soft).
And put it back on your double boiler to melt it down.
You won’t get the same smooth texture you had before. In fact, it’s kind of weird.
And then you can shove it into a new milk carton, seal it up, and wait another 48 hours.
Now it looks a little bit weird and rough, but it’s real soap! You can always trim off the rough bits.
So after 48 hours, you can cut your soap into manageable pieces. It’s very soft, so it’s not a difficult task. Make sure to wear gloves as you do it, in case there are pockets of lye hidden in the soap, and also because freshly made soap is really drying.
Set your soap upright on a rack or in a box (you want as much airflow around it as possible) and put it in a cool dark place to cure for at least 3 weeks. After that time, you can buff it to a shine with a soft cloth and wrap it for gifting!
I made six different batches of soap in my experiments. Here are the percentages and shots of the finished product, for your edification.
Olive Oil
I cut off some rough bits from this soap after we re-melted it, and saved them to use as inclusions in another recipe.
Lavender / Rosemary Mint (two separate batches with the same oil base)
Ground Lavender flowers and essential oil added at trace. Dried Ground Rosemary and Mint added at trace with Peppermint essential oil.
Chocolate Orange
Sweet orange essential oil added at trace. Turmeric added at trace for orange colour. Cocoa added and swirled in.
Coffee Cocoa
Lye solution made with chilled coffee (to learn how to make lye solutions using other things than water, read this article). Lemongrass Oil added at trace, together with 2 tsp cocoa and 2 tsp oatmeal.
Guinness Oat
Lye solution made with chilled, flat Guinness Stout. Sage oil added at trace, together with 2tsp finely ground oatmeal. Inclusions from Olive Oil soap added.
I recently got myself stricken with food poisoning and so spent an inordinate amount of time bent over my toilet bowl. In doing so, I noticed that, no matter how many times I diligently scrubbed the toilet from top to bottom, I was still smelling … THAT smell. Like a boys’ bathroom in a college dorm. You know what I mean.
Turns out that the problem isn’t my bad cleaning habits, but a gas leak from around the u-bend. Fixing it is easy peasy. Grab some all-purpose silicone and a pair of gloves.
Run a bead of silicone all around the bottom of your toilet to seal in the bad smell.
Run your gloved finger around that to smooth it down, and wipe off the excess with a dry cloth. Let it cure, and you’re good to go. Smell solved.
We currently live in an Italian neighbourhood and in the fall a good many of our neighbours squished their own grapes to make wine. The result was that there were plenty of these nice wooden crates at the curb when they were done. I knew I HAD to have them, to make SOMETHING, but I didn’t know what, exactly, I was going to do with them. Then my brother-in-law got a cat. Then my brother got a cat. Then my sister-in-law mentioned that she was going to get a cat. And cats like boxes. And these boxes are cat-sized. So there you go.
First I had to clean them off and scrape off the labels and sand them a bit.
The sides of the crates were made from particle board, so I didn’t sand too much, naturally.
I did wonder how the porosity of the particle board would affect my ability to stain it. I guess the only way to find out is to do it!
I used a variety of stains for this, the dregs that were in the bottoms of cans from previous projects. One was a gel stain, which I had never used before.
You can see how dark it goes on.
It almost covered up the ink on the sides of the crate, but came back through once I wiped off the excess.
Here you can see the other two stains, which were more translucent.
Wiping off the excess with a rag after painting it on.
It came out darker depending on the roughness of the wood.
And I forgot about the whole STAINING part of stain, and forgot to wear gloves. Oops.
Once they’d dried, I painted on a quick layer of varathane.
Again, because I didn’t sand them too much, we weren’t looking at baby’s bottom smoothness here.
The completed boxes.
I bought three pillows, each 13″ x 20″, which nearly fit the inside of the boxes.
Fortunately my mother has what amounts to a fabric store in her basement, so I had plenty of patterns to choose from for cushion covers.
I made the cushion covers in the same fashion as I make all my other cushion covers: with the simple overlap in the back that eliminates the need for buttons or zippers, which are beyond my skill level. I double-sewed all the seams because I wanted them to last through being removed for washing. I got the whole thing done super quickly, too, because I was using my grandmother’s sewing machine, which has two settings: terrifyingly fast, and supersonic. And I didn’t sew my thumb to anything, either, so I count that as a win.
The cushions, stuffed inside the covers.
And inside the box. There’s a little gap on the sides, but once the pillows get squished down by the cats they’ll fill the whole space.
I decided they were too tricky to wrap (and a waste of paper), so it’s more of a token wrapping job.
We spent Thanksgiving with Kª and Kº downstairs. Il Principe, the Incredibly Little Hulk, and twin girls were also in attendance. I wasn’t allowed to bring any food with me, but I thought I’d bring something to keep the kids occupied at least: playdough!
This stuff is so easy to make that you can customize it in a second.
In a decent-sized pot, mix together 2 cups flour, 2 cups warm water, 1 cup salt, 2 tablespoons vegetable oil, and 1 tablespoon cream of tartar.
I replaced a few tablespoons of the warm water with rose water and added a few drops of orange essential oil to the vegetable oil (I actually used almond oil, because it’s a better scent carrier than olive or canola).
Cook that on low heat, stirring often, and the mixture will begin to form the consistency of mashed potatoes.
Keep stirring.
When it starts to smooth out and pull away from the sides in order to clump in the middle, then you’re done. Test it with your fingers to see how sticky it is. If it’s still coming off on your fingers, keep cooking.
Pull out the dough and plop it on a piece of waxed paper until it’s cool enough to handle, which won’t be very long.
Then pull on a pair of protective gloves and separate the playdough into balls for colouring.
Add a few drops of food colouring to each ball and knead it in until the colour is even.
Once the colour is mixed in you won’t need gloves anymore. And if you’re not planning on colouring your dough, make sure to knead it for a while anyway, just to get the gluten going.
I made four different colours.
Then, obviously, you play with it.
When you’re ready to store it, seal it in an airtight container or wrap it tightly in plastic wrap. If it starts to dry out you can add a few more drops of water and knead that in; conversely, if it starts to get soggy due to humidity, you can always heat it again to get that water out.
We never decorate this early for Christmas. We’re more of the put-it-up-a-week-before-Christmas-and-take-it-down-New-Year’s-Day kind of people. In fact, because the Pie and I always travel home to Ottawa for the holidays, we don’t decorate at our house in St. John’s at all.
But there is snow on the forecast tomorrow, and we decided we wanted to enjoy a little bit of the holiday spirit while we were still home. Just a little bit, of course.
I was practicing my glass cutting technique and I had three jars with no tops. What was I to do with them?
I like lights. Why not make little hurricane lamps out of them, but without the prospective fire hazard of sticking a candle inside? Yes.
I also remembered an idea that Karen over at The Art of Doing Stuff had, and worked from there. If you don’t read her blog, you should. She’s hilarious. I discovered her site when she stole one of my photographs in the middle of the night. Sneaky lady.
So here’s the plan. I have these jars, and I have these LEDs that I can stuff in the jars. You get the picture? Good, because we’re not done yet.
I wanted these jars to look frosted, like someone had frozen three jar-shaped ice cubes and left them melting on my mantle. So it’s time to haul out the etching cream.
You can get a full how-to on etching glass from a previous post here, but I’m going to remind you again to observe all the safety rules and wear the proper equipment: goggles, mask, and gloves.
And because my sink is ceramic, I needed a plastic bucket full of baking soda in which to rinse my glass, to neutralize the acid.
I used a different cream this time than I had before, because when I needed it Lee Valley had temporarily stopped selling it. So this stuff looked like peanut butter with salt crystals in it, and it smelled much stronger than the other stuff I was using. But it had the same results. I didn’t want an even coating of frost, so I only applied a thin layer of cream and I only did one application. I was hoping that some spots would remain un-etched, and that my brush strokes would show through. And I was right! That doesn’t happen very often.
So here are the jars after frosting and rinsing. You can see that they look really like someone has just steamed them up on the inside.
Stuff some lights in them, however, and they go from steamy to frosty.
Up close, you can see my brush strokes in evidence.
Lined up on the mantle, with other things seasonal, it’s quite cozy.
This project was probably one of the most enjoyable that we did this past Christmas. Hazardous, yes, because you are dealing with a caustic liquid and its attendant dangers, but fun nonetheless. This is NOT a project you can do with children. You need to work in a well-ventilated area and you need to wear rubber or latex gloves as well as safety goggles while you are doing it.
For etching glass I used Armour Etch, a glass etching cream that I picked up from Lee Valley. You can get it at Michael’s as well, if you are prepared to pay about three times the price for it. It’s good stuff. Keep in mind it does not work on plastic and most Pyrex.
First, however, you need to create your stencils. I printed out some images from the internet and then traced them onto clear vinyl masking (also from Lee Valley).
The tracing and cutting out is really the hard part in all of this.
Next, carefully peel the backing form the mask and apply it firmly to your clean and dry glass. Make sure there are no bubbles or gaps.
You can also use masking tape to outline certain areas.
Next, very (very) carefully paint on the etching cream in a thick layer in the area you wish to be etched. If you accidentally get cream anywhere else than you intended, it will leave a permanent mark.
The instructions say to leave the cream on for 5 to 10 minutes, but I found it worked better if I left it on for 20. In some cases you may also find that a second application is in order.
When your time is up, rinse the glass object thoroughly in warm water. I found the cream came off best if I brushed it with the paint brush. As a side note, do not rinse off the etching cream in an enamel sink — only rinse in a metal or plastic sink or you will find yourself without an enamel sink …
Peel off your masking and throw it away. You may have to rinse the glass again if there was any cream caught in the crevices of the stencil. Dry the glass thoroughly and you’re all done. This is a jar for my brother-in-law Rusty to keep his keys and phone in so he doesn’t lose them. If you don’t recognize it, that’s the Rebel Alliance insignia from Star Wars.
I also used the cream on a vase for my sister-in-law Meg:
Some cups and saucers for the Mtree Duo:
An AT-AT jar for my brother Ando (in keeping with the Star Wars theme):
And a coffee jar for the ever-caffeinated Cait, among other things:
This was so much fun the Pie and I agreed we would try to think of new glass objects to give people for Christmas next year. You can pick up glass items from pretty much anywhere for relatively little: IKEA (where I got the jars), Winners/Home Sense (where Rusty’s and Meg’s vases came from), and let’s not forget second-hand shops (Mtree duo’s cups and saucers came from there). Get creative!
Ali Does It Herself 