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.
Posts
2 comments:
I have never made soap but do own a food scale. Not because I particularly care about quantities of anything I am indulging in at the moment, but because in baking if you can weigh your ingredients it tends to be more accurate and result in a better product.
But my purpose of writing this is not about food scales but about batteries. Now how do you go from Soap to Food Scales to Batteries you ask? Well here goes. A few weeks ago the local grocer had Rump Roast on Sale for a great price, but only if you buy in in bulk. So I buy enough roast to feed my family for years. I use roast for two dishes. One is for pot roast, the other for chili. In dividing the roast up I kept that in mind knowing that for a typical pot of chili I try to keep the meat at about 4 lbs (but roast can be any size). So after eyeballing things a bit I thought it would be better to just weigh the roast and label the packages with the weight so I can grab the appropriate size for whichever I decided to make. I grab my handy dandy food scale set it on the counter turn it on, it flashes for a second then promptly goes off. I think "Hmm that is weird these batteries usually last forever maybe I just did something wrong. I repeated this a few times till I finally determined that the result was always the same. I finally deducted that it just needed a new battery. So I popped open the battery compartment expecting to see 2 AAA batteries maybe AA. To my surprise it took flat round batteries that you find in things like watches just bigger, And one was GONE. Now I have been around long enough to know it is common to poach other electronics for batteries when you can not find any new ones lying around, but what the heck this was not just some run of the mill battery?
Regardless I did not have time for this mess so I ran into the bathroom to get the scale that I knew had batteries and attempted to use that. That is when I found out that the typical digital bathroom scale does not weight anything less than a certain weight.
Fuming I had to trust my instincts and divide things up and hope that I had enough in each back for its designated purpose.
Now this stuck with me for a while because I was absolutely puzzled as to what could have happened to this battery. Then I had a flashback. Our youngest son had me pick up a new battery for his garage door opener about 3 months before. While looking at the old battery he tells me oh that is not it, here is the one for the garage door opener. I asked him where this other battery came from and got the typical response of "I just found it". Common sense would dictate that he would either fess up or sneak the battery back later since it turned out to be the wrong one anyway. He did neither.
As revenge I replace his new garage door battery with the old spent one periodically. Sometimes I do it when we are out having dinner and he leaves his keys on the table. Sometimes I go into his room when he is hibernating and do it in plain sight. Every time I hear how quickly these replacement batteries are going out compared to the first one, and I always seem to have an extra one hanging around that he can use. At one time he thought one of his friends were messing with him. Of course he has yet to suspect me. I think I will eventually tell him, but I think I am going to wait until he is old enough to realize that I am not as stupid and clueless as he thinks I am. :)
No food scale?!?! I weigh every. thing. I. consume. It's a little obsessive though.
Al had a soap-making adventure before we got married. Now we buy it in bulk at Sam's Club.
Post a Comment