Selfsufficientish.com

im looking for recipes and advice on making my own soaps, shampoos, conditioners ect from entirly homemade ingredients.
i dont want to have to buy anything.
iv already got the jist of how to make lye from hardwood ashes and water, and using that along with animal fat for making soap.
im specifically looking for recipes for soap that include goats milk, honey, fruit, hearbs, butterfat ect.
with the milk for example, im not sure how to add that to the lye/fat mixture. will it effect the saponification prosess?
can you use this kind of soap on your hair as a shampoo?
what natural ingredients are best for your skin?
i can grow aloe vera but how do you prosess it to get the good stuff out?
i cant get things like shea butter or anything like that, too complicated.


advice please

this is the simplist method i can find:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZuzCD7EP1ZM

the others require building a more compltcated filter system and filtering the ash water repeatedly. this one is just soaking the ashes in water for a few days then filtering it through cheese cloth to get the lye solution.

has anyone worked with goats milk in making soap?
im guessing you have to concentrate the lye then slowly add the milk until it gets to the right dilution, substutiung the milk for the evaporated water?
or do you add the milk to the fat first then add the lye?

was also thinking of liquidizing rasperies and adding them for the colour and fragrance.
when you're adding other liquid ingridients what do you add them to? the fat or the lye? or after the fat and lye are already mixed?

i wish i could fine a proper book about this subject!

This is something I've been edging into lately. For the last 5 weeks I've completely done away with shampoo and am just using a lemon juice rinse once or twice a week. I'm currently experiementing trying to grow lemons from the seeds but I doubt any of them will produce lemons in this climate, but I figure it's worth a go!
For the last week I've done away with facewash, instead using the oil cleansing method. It's working just fine that I can tell but it's really difficult to get hold of castor oil where I'm at
I've not been able to do away with the shower gel yet though. It just seems so much more complicated. I've been doing a little bit of research on plants. At the minute Soapwort is looking like the best bet. In 'plants for a future' it says the flowers are used, but a few chats with herbalist friends have said that the leaves are used to form a lather and the root can be used as well to make shampoo and soap products. I'm going to try to get hold of some seeds and see if I can get some growing. I see some guerilla gardening on the horizon for me if I manage to get some of the seeds going!

Hi PurpleViolet, whereabouts are you? I had a fantasy of growing lemons and oranges in my conservatory until a friend politely pointed out that if I don't get enough sunshine to ripen tomatoes then I don't have a hope in hell of getting oranges to ripen. Still, lemons don't need quite so much warmth/light (I'm not sure which is critical), so I haven't given up entirely. I've seen them growing in fancy restaurants, complete with ripening lemons, so it's definitely possible to grow lemons indoors in the UK.

I think olive oil is supposed to be good for cleansing, if that's easier to get hold of than castor oil.

As for soapwort, did you know that it's poisonous to fish? This might be completely irrelevant to you, but we have a stream downhill of our garden, so I'm not growing it for that reason. What other plants have you considered? I thought about horse chestnuts as a local alternative to soap nuts (peeling off the dark skin first in case it stains, which might be too fiddly to be worth it) but didn't get round to gathering any this year.

Demi, I seem to keep jumping on your posts and saying, "Me too!" We're obviously thinking along the same lines

I've been growing oranges and lemons successfully in a conservatory in the UK - Wiltshire - for years. I've even made my own lemon curd and marmalade from home-grown fruit. They will ripen over winter but I guess it probably takes a bit longer than it would in a sunnier climate. It does take at least a year to ripen a lemon and they only produce fruit when the plants are a few years old so, if you are growing from pips, don't expect it to be fast. You might find it's actually cheaper to buy a small tree.

Zoe

hi Demi, this photocopy might help you:

http://www.divshare.com/download/16506542-a40

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Self-sufficienc ... =8-1-spell

There's a whole range of these. I've no idea what it's like but there are a few pages available to read online

Has anyone investigated lemon balm as a source of citrus. I made a cleaning solution from it years ago and it worked really well. I just stood fresh stems in a vase of water like a cut flower (nice) and then used the vase water to clean the windows.

It might have been luck or fluke but it did work.

southeast-isher wrote:hi Demi, this photocopy might help you:

http://www.divshare.com/download/16506542-a40

That's from Carla Emery's (RIP) Encyclopedia of Country Living. All ishers should have a copy!

Gosh didn't realise this forum would be so active - must check in more often I guess!

Apologies in advance to replying to everything at once.

I'm in South west Norfolk here. I have seen lemons growing prolifically in a neighbours garden. Southish facing fence but a fair bit of shade due to other gardens. It produces an absolute mass of lemons each year which just fall to the floor and rot. This though has given me hope that lemons will grow here if I'm lucky enough to stumble upon a little genetic beauty!
It would be a whole lot easier to buy in a couple of trees, but as we're home-ed our kids there's only one wage coming in and the budget is TIGHT lol!

I didn't know Soapwort was toxic to fish, no. The biggest reason for doing all this was to reduce my impact on the water cycle!!! Do you know if small amounts of soapwort in the water system are still dangerous to fish?

I was told last night to boil up nettles, preferable in soft water, to use on my hair. I think this was intended as a conditioner replacement rather than shampoo though.

Boil some nettles in water and cider vinegar and you have a really good scalp invigorator. It's really good for dry dry scalps and dandruff. Just use as a rinse after washing.

Lemons will grow in the UK but as they hate frost just cover them at night during winter.

PurpleViolet wrote: I didn't know Soapwort was toxic to fish, no. The biggest reason for doing all this was to reduce my impact on the water cycle!!! Do you know if small amounts of soapwort in the water system are still dangerous to fish?

I don't know about quantities, sorry. I've just seen advice not to grow it near garden ponds because it's toxic to fish. I thought the same would probably apply to a nearby stream, especially considering the amount of rain we get here.

PurpleViolet wrote:I didn't know Soapwort was toxic to fish, no. The biggest reason for doing all this was to reduce my impact on the water cycle!!! Do you know if small amounts of soapwort in the water system are still dangerous to fish?

Y'see, this sort of thing is why I'm a bit sceptical about home soap making (from an environmental perspective anyway). It's a pretty nasty chemical process involving all sorts of nasty stuff in pretty high concentrations - just because you get lye from wood ash doesn't mean that it's not just as nasty as sodium or potassium hydroxide from a chemical supply company. People who do it industrially are subject to all sorts of extremely stringent regulations in terms of effluent discharge, reagent storage, and so forth. By doing it at home, you're basically making an end run around a couple of hundred years' worth of regulatory development and going back to how it used to be done in the bad old days when soap works routinely poisoned rivers (and their workers) and never gave it a second thought.

Not that I want to tell anybody else what they should or shouldn't do of course, but I would encourage people not to just assume that doing something at home in ye olde fashioned way is always the superior option. Very often it is, but there's almost always a trade-off somewhere. As a home brewer, I get away with a lot that a commercial brewer would never be allowed to do, and I'm quite a bit less efficient in my use of energy, water, and materials. Deciding exactly where the balance lies between minimising transportation, maximising efficiency, and dealing properly with your effluents is often a very tricky business.

That's a really interesting point, Gregorach, I hadn't thought of that. I make soap sometimes although I buy the sodium hydroxide, I wouldn't have a clue how to get to it from wood ash. I don't want to be setting up a tiny unregulated chemical works in the middle of Cambridge, though... Perhaps I should think about my process... O_O

Well yeah, except that because of aforesaid stringent regulations, much of what you buy off the shelf has been manufactured in parts of the world where poverty precludes niceties such as protecting the local enviroment....then it's transported halfway acrosthe globe.