How not to make soap

In the spirit of sharing things that go wrong as well as things that go right, I have just made some cold-process soap (which I have made before perfectly successfully) and managed to crack the dish I was stirring the lye in. So now I am down one salad dish and have lye all over my draining board. (This is bad).

What am I going to put my salad in now?!! Tell me that!

Luckily I had enough lye left to redo the solution in something robust and plastic, but I also got lye all over my hands (this is very bad) so now my hands feel like when you have got bleach on them by mistake.

On the plus side, I did manage to get some semblance of soap out of it, so we will see what it is like when I unmould it tomorrow (I used turmeric in it to make it a different colour! And a blend of cedarwood, rosemary and ylang-ylang essential oils. It smells DELICIOUS. It is worth making soap just for the way it makes your house smell). And now I am a living example that you can have a Lye Disaster and live to tell the tale, so let that be a lesson to you all.

Note use of exciting natural colourant. I wish you could smell it! It's amazing

I wonder if anybody else has noticed, though, when you learn a new thing, sometimes the first few times you do it absolutely perfectly and then you go through a phase where everything goes wrong? I think the everything-going-wrong phase is actually the most important learning bit which sorts the women from the girls, at least that is what I am going to tell myself.

I am going off now to have a nice cup of tea and watch something mindless before cleaning the kitchen from top to bottom, because otherwise I will probably manage to drink water from the glass I measured the lye in or something really dim. So if you see a warning item on News At Ten regarding home soap making and the potentially tragic consequences, you will be able to say, hey, look! I read her blog!

(Or at least I used to…).