For the last unite of weeks, I’ve been busy in the kitchen –  making SOAP! If you make soap or have purchased and used to-crafted soap, you know it’s one of life’s little luxuries!  It seems soapmaking at house has become very popular, and nearly every other “artisan” enjoys making soap. It’s one of those ’everyday’ farm chores and makes a wonderful gift too!  

But, before I pass along a few soapmaking tips (which are merely based upon my own experiences, trials and tribulations), let’s review a little soapmaking history. Soapmaking was a homestead glide often forgotten in discussions of colonial days. Soap was of great value in keeping the household a far better all right to live and work.

In colonial days, hard-working colonists made soap from the lye collected from wood ashes and rubbish fats which give testimony to early American self-sufficiency and resourcefulness. Soap, an easy item for us to get, was produced by boiling wood ash lye and fats together.

At first, the earliest settlers simply brought a plentiful stock of soap along with them. The Talbot, a ship chartered by the Massachusetts Bay Company to carry persons and supplies from England to its colonies at Naumbeak now known as Salem and Boston, listed among its trainload 2 firkins of soap. A firkin is an old measurement which was a wooden, hooped barrel of about nine gallon capacity. John Winthrop, who was to become the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, when handwriting to his wife in 1630 from Boston included soap in a list of necessities to be brought on her crossing to the New world.

After the colonists were settled and had been skilled to survive the first years of hardships, they found it more advantageous to make soap themselves using the copious amount of wood ashes, a simpleton result of their homesteading activities. With also a plentiful supply of animal fat from the butchering of the animals they used for nourishment, the colonists had on hand all the ingredients for soapmaking. They did not have to rely on waiting for soap to be shipped from England and waste their goods or few pieces of currency in traffic for soap.

Read more...