The Every-Six-Month Soap Job

Awhile back I wrote about making your own soaps, and how much fun that can be even though it’s a lot of work. Besides, who are we dedicated homesteaders if we’re not people who actually enjoy working around our homesteads and doing for ourselves? It’s officially late October now, which means I’ve got a different soap job to do at my homestead.

I do this soap job every spring and fall, mostly just because I can. Besides, it saves my hard-strapped household of four adult-sized humans about $120 every six months on a single necessary household item, even after the not too high costs of ingredients and processing. Since some of the ingredients are also used to make bathroom and kitchen scouring powders, good ant and mouse repellants, and insect sting/burn/rash treatment, I figure the savings to the homestead overall for a year is pretty close to $300.00. That’s nothing to sneeze at, even though my labor is donated free!

This soap job is all about getting our clothes clean. Yes, I do way too much laundry - I still think my daughter and grandson pull clothes out of the drawers or off the shelves and toss them into the dirty clothes hamper if it’s not what they want to wear today instead of refolding and putting them back where they belong. They were gone out of state all of August and September and I didn’t wash more than three loads a week for just hubby and I. But I can’t seem to catch them at it, so I just do the washing (and the drying, and the folding, and the putting away…). It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it!

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Making Your Own Natural Designer Soaps

…The Old-Fashioned Newfangled Way!

Once upon a time things like laundry soap, dishwashing soap, handwashing soap and ever-so gentle complexion soap was all nearly as cheap as potatoes, cornmeal and all-purpose flour. Nothing anybody thought about ever making for themselves, because what would be the point?

With some home-grown and home-preserved foods, a gardener/homesteader will of course do it anyway despite the fact that these things can be purchased from the grocery store from mass production companies for a lot less than it takes to grow, harvest and process at home. That’s done for taste, nutritional content and pride in self-sufficiency. But soap, a very much basic part of our general upkeep of cleanliness all around the homestead, has until recently been practically a lost art form.

Now it’s coming back, in favor of specialty soaps that go for a pretty penny at natural food and product stores, but sell fast. Part of it is the ever-rising cost of mass produced soaps, some of it is the trend toward avoidance of animal products, and some of it is an increasing number of serious allergic reactions to chemical ingredients in mass produced soaps.

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