Beginners guide to cold process soap making: Episode 5 - Making a simple Lavender soap loaf

Welcome to our "Soap making for Beginners" guide! Over the next 7 days, we will be uploading a mini series of videos focusing on soap making for absolute beginners. We will cover things such as equipment, lye safety, soap making oils, terminology and how to make your very first soap.

We have put together this guide as we have had a lot of questions from people asking how to get into soap making and how they can learn to make soap. We are not the first people to put together a guide like this, but we know that when you are new to soap making it helps to have as many different resources to learn from as possible!

We have tried to cover everything that we can think of in our guide and if you watch each of our daily episodes they will hopefully give you a basic understanding of how to begin making soap safely. We will be covering a different soap making topic each days for the next seven days.

In today's episode we will be making our first loaf of soap. We have chosen to scent the loaf with Lavender essential oil, though you can scent with a different oil if you wish to (but do check safe usage rates first) or you can leave your loaf unscented.

If you are unsure about any aspect of the soap making process then it is important that you stop and do not attempt to make soap and instead research things further until you do feel confident!

If you are planning to follow our recipe, then you will need the following ingredients:

221g Water
110.5g Sodium Hyrdoxide
560g Olive Oil
200g Coconut oil
40g Castor Oil
24g Lavender Essential Oil (optional)
5g Lavender Flowers (optional)

We use the "TooGet" brand of Lavender flowers on our soap as we find them to be the brightest purple that we have found and they do not seem to fade to brown too badly.

If you have any comments or questions along the way, please do let us know so we can do our best to help you learn how to make soap!

If you enjoy our videos and soap making tutorials please do give us a like and subscribe :-)

In addition to this special, one off mini series, we also upload new soap making videos every Friday and new behind the scenes/business tips videos every Tuesday.

You can also follow us and find our soaps here:

If you do head over to our website, we offer our Youtube friends 20% off purchases if you enter code "youtube20" at checkout :-)

[CraftySheenaa]

Great video . Very informative as always . Thank you.

[kmcsciguy]

This video series has been immensely helpful for me as a new soaper! I want those blue loaf molds so badly and can’t seem to find them (I love the color)

[samanthamccloskey]

I’m beginning my soap making journey. Mostly research and equipment buying for now. Of my research your videos have been the most helpful. I’m gonna be commenting frequently to give you algorithm love. ❤️

[eugeniaGienieD]

This is very detailed. Thank you so much

[ahvinju]

Thanks for the informative videos and clear instructions, I really enjoy them! Using a soap calculator to make smaller (test)batches, I've made this soap loaf, as well as the coloured variations in the following videos. Works great, makes a very nice soap. However, I find the time between pouring and de-moulding needs to be far longer than 24 hrs because the soap stays rather soft, even after 48 hrs. I live in the Netherlands, so our weather is similar to yours. Any suggestions on speeding this up? Should I use salt to harden it? And if so, how much? Reaction will be much appreciated! ❤ from the Netherlands

[CAHassell]

Very well-taught and highly enjoyable; thank you very much for making these educational vlogs! Job well done and appreciated :))

[gozdetak]

Thank you for detalied tutorials. I will try this recipe

[lianasophie]

Thanks for the video series!
Does the water have to be distilled, or can it be straight from the tap?

[Keskinz]

Another amazing video. Thank you. Will you be able to do another video - curing and storing soap after cured etc. What should the humidity be? How to drop humidity? What equipment to use and so on. Once cured should the soaps be wrapped or still wait unwrapped till sold or given away?

[RS-gvcg]

Hi, Thanks for your videos and tutorials. I just made my first soap loaf! It all went to plan apart from the mixing with the stick blender to trace. The soap batter looked ok when i poured it in to the mould at the end. I found it came to a thick trace really quick. My stick blender is pretty powerful so i wonder if it was that its pretty noisy and has a lot of vibration coming off it. Or my combined oils when i reheated them may have been a little bit too hot when i added the lye water. Parts of the batter looked to be solidifying when i'd not had the blender on for very long. Can you give me any advice for next time ? Thanks :)

[_abramacabre]

Great tutorial! May I ask a question about the water? Does it need to be distilled water or is normal tap water ok?

Thanks!

[supergolfdude]

Wow! I never saw the chopstick pour tip. I’m constantly frustrated by fragrance oils dripping down the side of the bottle and onto the scale. 👍🏻

[travelingismypassionh]

Really good videos! Can I use this on my baby? Can i also add collodial outmeal powder?

[leighgriffin]

Brilliant tutorial, thank you. Can this recipe be used as a base recipe that can be added to? i.e different frangrance oils and colourants? TIA :)

[valeriapaps]

Your tutorials are really very helpful. Great job, thank I would like to ask if outside temperature plays a role in saponification and rapid tracing.

[rebecazepeda]

Hi Anne! I’ve been watching all of your videos for beginners and I’m finding them super helpful. Where can I buy the lavender essential oil for this soap recipe? Any suggestions are appreciated. I live in the US. Thanks so much!

[leannab]

How important is the temperature of the LYE and oil solution before mixing?

[harisrahman]

What would be the shelf life of the soap ?

[eugeniaGienieD]

Why does adding fragrance oil speeds up the trace?

[relaxedandlovingit]

During curing, How do you prevent the soap from collecting dust?