My adventure in making Goat Milk Soap

 This is a picture of  Heidi  with one of Jan's goats. Jan has a great little homestead with cats, bees,chickens,turkeys, geese, and of course goats. Jan and Fred also live in an 100 year old farm house with a huge garden in the back. I hope to post  about it another day. Today I wanted to talk about my adventures in making soap. This was my first time making soap and Jan's second time. So we decide to use a recipe from Our Half Acre Homestead on You Tube. Which I have to tell you is a great channel to watch. She is a lot of fun and very down to earth.  Anyway, things were going pretty good. We picked out our molds.

 Jan got lucky at a yard sale and got a big bag full of soap molds for 25cents each. I loved the little goat one (on the far left). After the molds were chosen we started melting our lard and following along with the video. Let me rephrase that: We did a lot of stopping and rewinding of the video. They always seem to move faster than real life.  Jan added the lye and water together and waited 5 minutes like it said. We then added the goats milk. What she didn't tell us at first was that the oil can't be more then 10 degrees hotter then the lye. Our oil was 30 degrees hotter then our lye so we tried to wait. Only problem was our lye started to trace. Which left us with no choice but to add the oil. Then to make matter worse we learned our stir stick didn't hit the bottom of the pitcher; if all else fails, grab a spoon. We only had time to do a few stirs before it started to get real thick. So we quickly poured it into the molds.

 As you can see from the top right of the picture, it looked as if it was separating. We decided to check to see if the mold on the bottom of the picture was doing the same thing. As is shown by the spoon print in it. Several of our other molds looked like they were also separating. So what to do? We just poured them back into the pitcher and tried to stir it up more. Can you say bad idea!

 This is what we ended up with. The stirring wasn't helping, so we just poured it into a pan and pressed it down.

 Now for the funny part. The soap turned out fine. Even the stuff we poured in the pan turned out. We just paniced a little bit. Ok, maybe a little more then a bit.

 I learned two important things that day: one, no more then 10 degrees difference between the lard and the lye mixture. Two, no matter what happens it's always a good time  with a great friend by your side.

This is my box of the goat soap. Now all I have to do is be patient for four weeks. I am so looking forward to using it. Will I make this again? YES! Even with the mishaps I had a great time. Besides don't they say "practice makes perfect"?