HelpfulGardener.com

It has been 3 years since I made lye soap. The rumors about lye soap being hard on your skin are not true. This is very good soap I like it better than factory made soap.

I put a lot of garden basil in the kitchen blender with 13.5 ounces of water it turned into green water that had a very strong basil fragrance that smelled up the whole house. After mixing in the Lye and Lard then pouring it into soap molds then aged it 30 days there was no basil smell and it was no longer green. It was still good soap.

People that make lye soap with store bought fragrance says it does not work well either.

I am board being a prisoner inside the house. I need something to do at night. I am tired of TV & computer. Basil is the strongest smelling herb I can think of. I don't have any garden herbs at the moment but I could buy cilantro or rosemary.

Has anyone made lye soap?

Nope. I make goat's milk soap with purchased soap base and fragrance it with my home made herbal essential oils. Blending it up doesn't retrieve the oils. Really you need a still. I have a couple of small, cheap distillers, both of which really give me hydrosols (essential oils with some water still attached). For my purposes that's good enough, but I wish I could make true essential oils.

You can make fragranced oils (not true essential oil) by taking some neutral flavored oil, like soybean oil, sunflower oil, jojoba oil, etc. Fill a jar up with dried herbs, then pour the oil over them and fill it to the top. Put a tight lid on it and let it sit in a warm place (but not in direct sun) for a month. Filter the herbs out, pressing the oil out of them. If you want a stronger fragranced oil, repeat the process with the same oil but fresh herbs.

That should give you oil with enough herbal essence infused in it to fragrance your soap.

Also sage and rosemary have higher oil content and more aromatic, so work better for this purpose. If you have junipers around you, juniper berries are excellent for this.