New! How to make calendula, honey & oatmeal soap | Deanna Russell | Skillshare
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New! How to make calendula, honey & oatmeal soap

teacher avatar Deanna Russell, Small Business Boss

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Calendula soap intro!

      0:55

    • 2.

      Our love affair with handmade soap

      2:40

    • 3.

      The ingredients for this project

      4:39

    • 4.

      Soaping tools

      4:36

    • 5.

      Quick soap safty review

      2:17

    • 6.

      6makingthesoapsteps

      3:38

    • 7.

      Soap batter up!

      5:16

    • 8.

      The big reveal

      3:17

    • 9.

      Cutting the soap

      1:54

    • 10.

      One more tip

      1:54

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Project

About This Class

Class project: Calendula, honey and oatmeal cold process soap

This formula will provide you with an excellent palm free, fragrance free soap option.

If you need it to be vegan, omit the honey powder. If you need it to be gluten free, you can omit the colloidal oatmeal powder. You have options!

Instructors for this class: Deanna Russel | Charys Russell- Mother and daughter team teaching the class

Level: Intermediate and up

Age: Adult (18 and up)

Pre-Requisites: Already have made a couple of cold process soap batches | Know how to resize soap batches using a soap calculator | Have access to the tools, materials and ingredients to make this project.

Instruction booklet included: Yes: PDF format, printer friendly. This is located under the resources tab.

Related resources:

Blog article: https://naturenotes.ca/get-the-most-from-your-artisan-soap/

Blog article: https://naturenotes.ca/guide-to-nature-notes-cold-processed-soap/

Affiliate status: We are NOT affiliates or being paid in any way to recommend any of the ingredients, materials or tools we use for the class- It’s what we have access to ourselves and decided to purchase. As such, the list includes Canadian suppliers.

About Deanna and Charys

We have been making soap together for a few years, starting as a simple hobby: A creative and fun life skill.

All of our soap is palm oil free. Most of the soap that we make is also unscented. When we decide we want an aromatic bar, we carefully choose essential oils that are skin friendly, reasonable to access, both considering sustainability as well as budget friendly.  We don’t make our soap using synthetic fragrances, but you can use them if desired.

We like our soap making projects to be well researched as far as choosing our ingredients, too. Shelf life, ingredient stability and skin benefits are definite factors. 

We also invest in research and development, which really is: Sometimes we create different soap just to see what will happen! This is part of our lifelong learning goals. Calculated experimenting is crucial to discovery. Plus, no experience is ever wasted!

Interested in other life skills such as gardening? Ty our Urban Gardening in a cold climate class.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Deanna Russell

Small Business Boss

Teacher

Personal note:

In recent years I have been much more aware of how having and using certain skills is very, VERY useful. Knowing how to create my own things using sustainably sourced ingredients is empowering!

Things I enjoy doing for myself and my family include: growing our own vegetables and then canning and processing them for future use, making my own cold processed soap, making my own tea blends and making my own skin care items. These are very tangible ways to look after family and friends.

My class plans include bringing you more life skills so that you can have these useful skills, too.

Being certified in graphic design has proved a valuable tool for creating packaging and labels for handcrafted products. (Master Design in graphic design from ... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Calendula soap intro!: Hi, Welcome. My name is Deanna Russell. This is my daughter, Keras. Together we make soap and today we're going to show you how you can make your own cool july having an opening process. So from scratch, this class is for intermediate soap makers. So you should already know the basics of making cultural system because well, we're going to go over the basics briefly. We're not going to explain the basics. You should already know how to make your own. So it's also helpful if you have a few fails behind your belt as well. So if you want to make this so vegan, you can omit the honey powder that's in the recipe. And if you want to make it gluten free, you can simply omit the oatmeal, this bar, and actually all of our bars, they're all POM for you. So let's get into it. 2. Our love affair with handmade soap: So let's talk about how we got started with this. We started making soap together. We like to do it together. It's a family endeavor. Yeah, it's bonding badmouth that we have and it's harder to find time to do it now together because she's a lot busier than me. I don't really have much of a life, but she does. So we find the time to make the soap together as often as we can. We loved doing it. It's a lot of fun and it's pretty creative to it grows a lot faster with two people as well. Yeah, that's right. We divide up the jobs, don't we? How did we start doing it? So there's a soap making company in the city where we live nearby. And they have a workshop where they show you how to make cold process for a birthday present for my birthday one year. We did the workshop together, so it was myself, my mother, and my grandmother. We all took the course, we added together as an event. And then after that, they have the workshop in the back. And then they also have a store where you can buy yourself making supplies and supplies. We did the chlorine in the class and then we just bought all of the supplies that we needed right away so we can make so I think we started making soap like that week as well at home. And that was a few years ago. And they the recipe that they started us on, it used palm oil in the recipe. And I decided right from day one that when I was going to make my own soap, it was going to be pumped free. So all the recipes that we're gonna ever show you, starting with this one are gonna be palm free soaps. And that's because it's really hard to just straight up impossible to get ethically sourced palm oil if this is the inability question, yeah, yeah. Yes, it does make the sole partner and a lot of recipes call for it. And if you want to use it, that's fine. But if you want an option, that's really awesome, that doesn't have it in, then just take his class and you'll find a good solution for that. We took the class regarding supplies and we started making her own recipes right away because all the recipes that I could find, I'll have palm kernel in which we didn't want to use. The other thing that we do when we formulate is we only use natural colorants. So that'll be clays. Or Mike has, perhaps I haven't really used Mike as much. And only natural frequencies with this collegial or recipe. The things that we put into it, the honey powder, the colonial oatmeal and color Angela, they're all very, very skin friendly and that's why we've used them. It's also a very creamy bar, very creative. It's a nice bar texture. It's one of our favorites. With that, we'll move on to the next item. 3. The ingredients for this project: So we've just thought it would be helpful to show you where we actually source a lot of our supplies from. And I just want to start off with saying that when you use the handouts from this class, run it through a soap calculator so that you can print off your own copy like this, so that you can make your adjustments for whatever size of mold that you want to use because you can easily do that using soap calc. So- and then you can also make your own notes on there as well. So we always use a sheet protector to keep our sheets of paper soap free and mucky free. Yes, it just in case there's an accident, but yeah, those happen in our kitchen. Yeah. All the time. Okay. So the first thing that you'll need is distilled water. Really, really easy to get that. You can get it at superstore or any grocery store. And it's very inexpensive. If you didn't want to use distilled water, some other liquid, you could use like a carrot juice or an aloe juice or something like that. But the recipe we're showing you in this class uses distilled water. So the next biggest ingredient that we use is pumice olive oil. This is the bulk of most of our recipes; is definitely the largest quantity of oil that we put into any soaps. So it's nice, it's soft. It's a very good bar, is really nourishing for the skin too. You can get this actually at the grocery store, which is where we found this one. If you get an olive oil that is not pumice, just make sure that you select that when you're using your soap calculator because there is a difference on calculation for that. So the difference between regular olive oil and pomace olive oil is that pumice is the third pressing of olives. So it's really, really bad for cooking. It doesn't taste very good, but it has all of those nice, nice nutrients from the olives, that are great for soap making because they're good for your skin. So coconut oil is another part of what you'll be needing to make this. It is what helps to create the cleansing part of the bar as well as hardness of the bar. So we use that as well. You can't make soap without lye. So the technical name for that is sodium hydroxide. And we usually get this in the bigger buckets because we go through quite a bit. So if you're just starting, you don't need a bucket this big. You can easily do one with half that size. So this is sunflower oil, which is one of the smaller oils that we put into this bar. Actually I don't know that much about sunflower oil. It's- I like using the sunflower oil because it's high in oleic acid, which is, provides a really great skin benefit. And actually the same reason why we use the safflower. And it says even write on here it's high oleic, so that's what you're looking for. And they're just very easy to work with and they're stable and they have a long shelf life. And that's two of the reasons why we selected these oils for this formula. So one thing we also put it as bar is kaolin clay, which is a white clay. And that helps with from the coloring. So this soap is a yellow bar. It just makes it a little bit creamy because the coconut, coconut oil is a very, very, very stark white and it just softens. Also, it provides a bit of slip to the bar. That's the other reason why we use kaolin clay. So of course, your honey powder, that's what you're using. You'll be weighing that up by the gram because it's a smaller amount. If you have a scale that goes down to the part of gram that will even be better yet, we actually use two scales. One that goes down to the gram and when that goes down to the part of the gram. We're usually using the scales simultaneously, because we measure things together. So I'll be using one scale and she'll be using the other. And the other thing that you can put into this - that is nice for the skin into the colloidal oatmeal is easy to work with us while because it dissolves and disperses very easily into the oil phase. And the last thing that we'll show you is the calendula flowers. I usually buy it by the pound because I use it quite a bit. And we just got that one from Golden Bough. So we'll leave description links. So you can access some of these websites and find out where you can get them. And that's the supplies were used to make this project. 4. Soaping tools: So I just want to spend a minute or so going over some of the things that we use the most and that you'll probably need something like a bit to make your soap. So you'll need containers, obviously. These are the ones that I use to weigh out lye, powders, things like that. I don't use them for food at all. They're solely dedicated for soap making. This little container is super-helpful because of the pouring funnel that it has. I got this at a local soap crafting supply store where I live. I'll put the link for that in the class description so you can see how much they cost and possibly they shipped to your location. But you'll need a couple of these. So that's the pouring thing. Stirring implements. You need a couple of them. We have several different ones. Some of them we only use for lye, some of them we only use for oil. You can use,- don't use metal. They should be plastic or wood or plastic or wood. These kinds of mixing dishes, you need to have something. So the smaller ones we got first, I just got it at our local Home Depot. I have a couple of them. They fit into my microwave and this is what we melt down our coconut oil and cocoa butter and shea butter in, in the microwave and it's okay. And also it fits nicely onto our scale that we use. This one is for making the bigger batches of soap. And you can't really fit this in the microwave. And it also doesn't like to be on the scale because we don't have a big enough scale. But that's where you can dump stuff. So depending on the size of batch that you're making, only different sizes of holding and measuring and pouring containers. The other thing that you definitely will need is an immersion blender, something that you can clean it easily, something that you can store easily. You can get a secondhand one if that's available to you. And the other thing that we, that you do need is a mold. Now, this is one of my favorite little molds. It comes with a built-in silicone liner. But it only makes a 2.5 pound batch of soap. So after we bought two of those -and we used them for actually quite awhile. So if you're just getting started with that, this is actually an ideal size to have and it has an insulating lid as well. So that's my right now. It's my favorite model even though I use a five-pound mold as well. Now for cutting the soap after it's ready to be cut. I just want to show you my first soap mold cutter. Yeah. This is it. This is my.. so I took a trip to the hardware store, it involved a bit of cutting with the wood. There's a wing nut here and a sliding thing with a notched out edge so that you can determine how wide you want your soap bar and then you just use you put the soap in there. Actually this would this fits very nicely in there. That's why we got this. And then you just make your cuts with a knife and it's pretty simple. However, I had a terrible time trying to cut everything really uniformly and because I was selling the soap. Well, a little bit of that is okay. I wanted it to be- the soaps to be more uniform in weight and size all the time. So that is why I ordered the next soap mold cutter. This is the one that I got when I ordered my 5 pound mold. And it came with asoap cutter, which is straight edged so that it makes - so that when you cut it, it makes the same exact straight up and down cut. So your variance isn't as much. And it's also fully adjustable so that you can make it whatever you want. So that is that those are the tools that I use the most. And I'll try to put links in the description so that you can go and look around for yourself where you can get some of these things. 5. Quick soap safty review: Welcome to the safety section of our show here I was adjusting clothing with my gosh. Are you ready? Yes. Okay. Welcome to the safety recap part of the class. This is actually quite important, which is why we're going to just do a quick review. First thing that carries is going to do is tie back her hair. She's wearing long sleeves right now, but I'm also going to give her a lab coat put on because that's how we roll here in our house. There's a story behind this lab coat. So I am assuming that the university, once at the bookstore, I was walking past to get to a class or something. And they had lab coats on sale outside and I saw them. I thought my mother needs a lab coat. Now I am the founder owner of a lab, so I bought her a lot code for the boroughs all the time. Yeah, I like wearing it would weaken. So anyway, Social do that. The other thing that you should have is safety gloves. You can use ordinary dishwashing gloves or what we call cleaning gloves if you want to, those are her favorite, they're a bit longer. The other thing you could do, the nitrile gloves like that if you can find that or you can use a regular book like that. Another thing you need to have just regular glasses, not protected, not enough. You need to have something else. Those are the ones that she likes to use the most are the ones that clear. Yeah. Easier to see through. You also should be working and events, especially when you're putting your light powder into the live water, you need to do it in a well ventilated areas such as the outside terrace is going to explain to you the order of adding the mixture together. So go ahead. When you are mixing your alive water, remember that you have to put your lie into the water, not water into the live. Also, keep your kids and pets out of the way when you're making so they bumped something, you could have potentially a serious problem. But I think that pretty much recaps the safety. And if you can handle bleach competently, you can handle by as well. 6. 6makingthesoapsteps: The very first thing that you will do is gather up all the items that you'll be needing before you start mixing up stuff. The timing on some things will be tight, so you'll need to be prepared. Okay, let's do this project will start with making the lie water. The first thing that we do is weigh out the lie. The inky name for this is sodium hydroxide. Use a digital scale to do this. I got this skill years ago at Staples. It's actually a postage scale, and I use it almost every day. Still using the digital scale. Next, weigh out the distilled water. The reason I recommend using distilled water is that it is free of contaminants and will provide a consistent outcome every time. Now you'll be adding the light into the water. We have a spot on our friend step where we do this. Now you can stir this mixture until all the light is totally dissolved. It will take a minute or so. When the liquid is clear and there are no clumps or crystals, then it's ready. It will be very hot. You can leave it outside for a few minutes and then bring it indoors. But be sure that no animals can get into it and keep an eye on it. This step completes part one. You will need to let this mixture reach room temperature. You can use this time to move on to part two. You may have noticed the garbage bags on the countertop. Since we don't have stainless steel work surfaces, we need to protect our countertops. Lie will definitely eat away at things and we've actually had some ellipses with the counter. So keep your counters protected and keep paper towel close at hand as well. This is where working in pairs is really handy. One of us will weigh out the liquid oils while the other ways out the powders, clays, and in other cases, essential oils. This little scale is very handy for weighing out ingredients that measure parts of a gram. You can find them listed as jewelry scales, and this one costs about $30. The blue weigh dish you see here is actually a plastic gelato dish that I saved while traveling. It's the perfect size for small amounts. Now you can weigh out the hard oils such as coconut oil. Some of our other recipes use either shea butter or cocoa butter. And if we're using those weird way the mountain out also, if you are using the collegial of flowers, measure that out now to melt the coconut oil using medium heat and 32nd increments until it is fully melted into liquid form. Depending on where you live and how warm it is that day, this step may take varying amounts of time. The trick is to do this over medium heat, not high heat. Whether or not you use the microwave or the bain marie method. If you try to melt down the oil too fast over high heat, the unresolved will not be pleasing. Just to recap the plan here. Number one, make the whitewater and set it aside, allow it to reach room temperature about half an hour to an hour. During this time, you can grab a beverage and take a bathroom break. Number two, you'll weigh out the oils, the liquid and the solid. You'll be melting down the coconut oil during this phase. Next, you'll lay out all of the dry ingredients, including the powders you're using, as well as the flowers. At this time, you can get your mold ready if you need to align it with parchment paper. Do that now. If your mold that already has a liner, makes sure that it's clean and dry. Now is also the time to clear the area of pets, small children, and anyone who might get in the way. Make sure you are wearing your safety gear and that you'll be uninterrupted for the next several minutes. Are you ready? Let's make that soap. 7. Soap batter up!: Okay, So I'm just getting ready to mix up my actual, soap here, this is my melted coconut oil and this is my other oils that are already liquid. So I'm going to combine that. Now. I've got my honey powder, collodial oatmeal And kaolin clay. All my powders are mixed in this dish. I'm just going to add them to my oil and then whisk that in. You want to make sure that this is fully incorporated before we add the lye mixture. Okay, now, I'm going to be using this five-pound mold. that I ordered off of a shop from Etsy and it didn't come with any liner. So I use this, I'm going to try this for the first time. I don't know how it's gonna work. But I cut up some plastic shelf liner paper and I just made myself a thing to fit in there. I guess we'll find out what happens with that later. And you'll get to see that like me. So now I'm ready to add my lye water to my oil mixture all at one time. And now I start mixing. You can see that it's changed color and it's, you can tell that it's going to be very creamy like and that's exactly what I want. (mixing sounds) If I was using any essential oils, I would add them now, but this is going to be scent free, so we're just gonna keep on going. It's starting to thicken up a little bit, but it's not ready yet. We're approaching a light trace, but you just have to be patient and wait for the right time. We're not quite there yet. Pretty soon I'll be able to add in my calendula flowers. Oaky, we've got a light trace. Okay, I think I'm going to add in my flowers now. These are dried calendula flowers. And I'm going to incorporate them. Just at this trace point. We're almost ready to pour. Okay, that's looking good. I'm just going to set aside my immersion blender. Okay. I'm ready to pour it. Now it's looking like some kind of crazy pudding, but we're not going to eat this. I'm just going to burp it, just to get out any air bubbles. Then I'm going to cover it with a plastic wrap and then I'm going to put the lid on and then I'm going to insulate it in a little towel. Okay.. Then I'm going to tuck this into bed and I'll check on it in a few hours later today. I can take off my safety glasses, I'm going to keep this on for a little while until I finished carrying it to its little spot. And that's how you make the calendula soap. 8. The big reveal: Okay, let's just have a quick little check on our soap. It's insulating and a towel to keep it warm- and I'll take off the lid. Okay. You can see that it is going through the gel phase. I actually want that to happen. And I don't want it to get too hot, but it looks like it's gonna do all right. So I'm just going to tuck it back in. And I'm going to wait for it to cool fully. It's actually still quite warm and it's a couple of hours after I made it. I'm going to let it cool overnight and I'll check on it again in the morning. So now we've just been checking on a soap and we feel like it's ready to come out of the mold. So you're going to watch me on unmold that and then I'm going to cut it. So what I like about this particular mold is that it has a fully collapsible system so that you can get everything out really easily. So it just totally disassembles. Et voila! It's ready to come out. Now to get this out of here. Remember I told you this was the first time I'm using this (plastic shelf) paper liner that I made. I'm hoping to get more than one use out of it. So I'm going to be careful on how I take everything out. It's pulling away easily. Which means that now is the right time to take it out. So I actually cut this into strips and then I attached it using packing tape. So if I need to slit this open, I can easily do that and then reattach it using different packing tape when I need to. See that? It just comes undone. So that's the freezer paper. It was actually good experiment. I'm happy with how this worked, and I'll probably do this again. So I can easily wash that and reattach it and reuse it. So excellent. The next thing I'm gonna do is put this into my cutter. Very carefully. One of our piece here, the bottom should just slide off. Okay. 9. Cutting the soap: Now on this cutter I have marked already where the lines are that I want to cut on. And so I'm just going to make sure that that's in place and tight enough. The first cut that I make because it wasn't totally square, I'm just gonna make it- do an end cut, just to square it off. And that's what the soap looks like. Okay, so I'm just going to finish cutting this and then when I'm done I'll show you what it looks like and I will see you in a bit. You might be wondering why I'm putting them into chunks like that. You will find out just a minute. So once I get this all cut, I'm going to take it onto my soap curing rack downstairs and it's going to cure for probably close to six weeks. And after that time, then I can wrap it up and take it to the market to sell or give away or use here. And that is how you make honey, oatmeal and calendula soap. 10. One more tip: I don't know. Happy soaping! We hope that you've enjoyed this class with us. We've had time. We've had fun making both the soap and the class. I hope you can tell, we like to have fun together. And while there are serious aspects of making soap, it can be really, really fun and it can be a good family activity if you can survive it together. So now you have a really good formula and recipe that you can use to make your own soap for sensitive skin that is palm free and you can also customize it to make it vegan and Gluten-free. Yeah. And this is what it looks like. This is what ours turned out like. This isn't the size of bar that we normally cut it to. This is just one of the little tidbit said I've had leftover when you trim. Yeah, So to recap, what we did in this class is we showed you- we did a a safety review to make sure that you're safe when you make soap. yeah. We did a quick review, overview of the supply ingredients that you need to make this particular recipe. And then we walked you through how we make it. So yeah. Well, you were the one on camera, I was behind the camera in those. Yeah. So now you know how we do it. You might have noticed that we don't use a thermometer. We've actually never used a thermometer. We weren't taught using a thermometer. Yeah. The important part is that your lye is pretty well at room temperature and that all of your oils are liquid. So if you have any solid oils, they just need to be melted. So you don't need to worry about hitting a specific temperature of your ingredients when you're mixing. This should just be the same when you mix them together. So that's a quick final tip to end the class and join us next time. We'd love to bring you more soap classes if you can all take it. That's it. Thanks for watching. Bye for now. Happy soaping!