I had gotten a Melt & Pour kit and made a few batches of soap. It was a quick and easy, but it wasn’t much of a challenge for me. I really wanted to someday try making soap from Lye and Oils, but didn’t know when I could jump into such a large project.
When my father in law told me that I should sell these, I told him that I would think about it, that if I did sell them it wouldn’t be the Melt and Pour kind, I wanted to try it the old fashioned way. After a few weeks of reading books and watching a ton of tutorials I felt ambitious enough to try making soaps using Lye. I spent a lot of time using the Lye Calculator to come up with my own recipes. I Cold Processed my first two batches (one lard based, one shortening based)
Then I played around with Hot Processing (a bastille base).
I attempted Rebatching, using the Cold Processed Soaps that I didn’t think turned out so great (the shortening and lard soap).
I even tried Cold Process Oven Processing soaps(Shortening and Custom Soaps). Which turned out great too.
I had expected to not be able to accomplish all of these so fast, but with the avenue of rebatching a possibility for any soaps that didn’t have even fragrance, color or additives, I felt this craft was flexible enough for me.
By this time it was May and I was scrambling for people to take the soaps that I made to try them out. I wanted there input as well.
I tried a few packaging ideas to play up the packages that I was sending out to family and friends around the country. I loved the challenges each step posed and I was able to throw myself into each endeavor without a large investment on our household budget. Our soaps soon dwindled down to a scarce few.
I set myself a large and crazy goal at the beginning of June to have enough soap to sell in a town wide garage sale a month later. If I was able to sell quite a few I would start a business and jump in otherwise it would have been a fun job for a month at least, with little pay. I was honing my craft….
In a month I made over 70 soaps (my original goal was 50), I had so much fun (and the by Grace of God) everything I made seemed to come out awesome. I was using Lard, M&P and Bastille soap bases for these, all the Lye soaps were Hot Processed due to the time crunch. I sold more than half of these and I thought that I did awesome.
Last month I got requests from all over for more soaps, I knew I was starting a business so I made it official. I have placed some of my soaps in a store and I am now taking orders personally for customers out of the area or for customers who want custom made soaps.
I will be journaling my achievements and failures to everyone on here. But as of now the only failure I feel that I can make is from not learning from my errors. I look forward to letting everyone know my day to day trials and errors and sharing with you my journey. Thank you for joining me and reading how I got started.
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