Handmade, really???

What does handmade really mean?  To some it means getting a kit, sort of like a cake mix and mixing the kit contents together to have a finished product.  Often people find a great deal of satisfaction in this procedure.  This is why Michael’s and  Hobby Lobby are so popular.  They provide items for us to use that speak to our creative side.  Kits are great!  They’re fun, quick, rewarding and mostly easy and sometimes even inexpensive.

I admit to being a bit of a snob when it comes to the concept of handmade.  If you ask my kids they will say that I’ve never made their birthday cake with a cake mix (never is a long time and I’m glad their memories are of the best cakes I’ve made, not the simplest).  I used to make my own clothes, I tend to enjoy cooking with ingredients that I wash, chop or grind myself.  I usually pick my own strawberries, blueberries etc., and can or freeze as much as possible. If I had a push mower I’d use it too, although probably only once a year just so I could say that I did it!  (Where did that mower thing come from anyway?  I think homemade and old timey are synonymous to me)

So what’s the point here anyway.  It’s about soap.

We start with large containers of our butters, oils and additives of things like oatmeal, cinnamon, rosemary, and cocoa.  This all goes in a very large stock pot in a very specific order.  When we’ve mixed our ingredients we pour the “batter” into a mold and put it to bed, really!  The soap mix has to stay warm in order for the chemical reaction that creates a hard bar to take place.

After 24 hours we unmold the soap and cut each bar by hand.  At this point the soap is placed on a handmade rack to dry for three weeks.  Sometimes we hand-trim the soap immediately or wait until later.  When the soap is sufficiently dry we shrink wrap the soap, again by hand and apply the labels to each bar.

As you can tell, this is a labor-intensive process and is all done by hand.  I love soap-making, every part of it.  There are faster, easier ways, some of which we’ll adopt once it becomes necessary.  For now, we are enjoying the simplicity and rewards of doing it all by hand.