Homemade Castile Soap

I am truly in love with handmade soap.  The rich lather.  The earthly smells.  The soft skin.  I love that through it I'm linked to all the women before me who learned the simple, but necessary tasks like knitting, sewing, canning, baking bread and soap making.   I hope that I will pass this reverence for natural living onto my kids so that they can enjoy life's pleasures. 

I really don't know what took me so long to do this.  Ok I do.  The looming possibility that I could potentially blow up our house and all of us in it if I mixed the chemicals wrong.  I wonder if my great grandma ever worried about blowing up the farm house?  We are quickly running out of my beloved handmade soap and at $5 a bar, I decided that if generations of women before me could do it, then so could I.  Here's the recipe I used.

Basic Veggie Soap:  aka. Castile Soap:
12 oz organic coconut oil
12 oz olive oil
20 oz shortening
16 oz distilled water
6 oz lye

http://www.millersoap.com/ for everything you ever wanted to know about making soaps!

I'll post some pictures after I get them cut tomorrow:)