Do you possess the caustic materials necessary to make your own soap? You know, soap. That stuff you can buy bars of at the Dollar Tree for $1. Or if you are super fancy, at Target you can get a big 'ol multi-pack of the stuff for an Abe Lincoln.
I guess I decided life wasn't complicated enough. Why else would a person in this day and age decide to make her own bars of soap?
These are the kinds of things that start happening when you don't have television and you begin to think, through boredom, it is a good idea to pay attention to random people on the World Wide Web. It's not like there are any crazies out there!
It started last week, when the Pastor sent me an ad he had found on Craigslist for a soap-making class (or murder entrapment scenario) in some guy's garage, $50. I thought the Pastor was suggesting we make a date out of it, $100. No, he said. We don't both need to go, just one of us. I guess neither of us felt comfortable with the soap maker/serial killer, and in the end, neither of us went. $0.
About a week later I saw something Pinteresting - a crackpot who had made soap in her crockpot. Perhaps this was a solution. We could learn to make soap while decreasing the odds that we would end up in the crawl space of someone's garage while doing it.
Seemed easy enough. I already had a crockpot. In fact, I have five crockpots. I could make a lot of soap if I wanted.
The necessary ingredients were procured, mixed, heated, poured and molded. No super fancy soap molds here, just Rubbermaid containers.
I'm not going to lye to you. Ha ha, see what I did there? It was fun. It is bizarre that something is drain cleaner one minute, and then magically transformed into something safe enough to use even on your most special places. If you are just buying your soap at the Dollar Tree, you are missing out on this mystical experience even if you are having another mystical experience entirely by witnessing the other people who shop there.
In the end the soap making venture cost $75 which came out to $5 per bar. If you are keeping track, that is 75 items at the Dollar Tree.
Unlike other projects I've done lately (making my own laundry detergent) this one was definitely not a cost-saving measure. As an added bonus, the equipment needed included a food scale. Nine years in Weight Watchers yet I had never before purchased a food scale. This explains so much. Did I mention I'm spending $13 a week to go to Weight Watchers? That's a lot of bars of soap.
Early testing has revealed the soap smells good, gets sudsy and cleans your body.
I know what you must be wondering now. Robyn, are you going to go to the crafty store to purchase soap molds, essential oils and embellishments? Will you form your own wildly successful soap making business with the Pastor? Or perhaps turn into one of those lucrative bloggers with fancy photos, a professional looking website, ad space and eventually a book deal?
No.
But at least I will be clean, one way or another. Plus it turns out the Pastor finds the whole pioneer spirit of a woman who makes her own soap while wearing high-heeled, knee-length boots and false eyelashes with her apron and rubber gloves to be incredibly sexy.
And now you are caught up with what's been going on in the Parsonage - just good, clean fun.
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