This Sud's For You

Along with remembering our fallen heroes and the rest of the brave soldiers who have stood in the gap for our country, Memorial Day heralds the beginning of summer vacation. Many celebrate with big barbecues, so I thought, “what better soap to make this weekend than beer soap?”

A derivative of hops, which have a relaxing quality as well as anti-bacterial qualities, beer soap is soothing to the skin as well as cleansing and moisturizing. I have found it to be a great shampoo bar for my own hair, adding body and making my hair feel thicker. Added cocoa butter in the soap acts as a de-tangler and is easily absorbed into the skin, benefiting dry scalps. 

“This Sud’s For You” is a natural colored bar with a hint of added cocoa, making a luscious smelling, creamy, sudsy soap bar with great cleaning qualities.

This soap will be ready to sell in about 4 weeks.

Hope you had a great weekend!

Kim/Petey

To order soaps, contact me at:
ranchrustics@me.com

Hittin' the Suds

It’s Memorial Day weekend and lots of people are BBQing and hitting the ‘suds’.   Here it’s cold and it’s snowing outside. Nevertheless, I need to get the Summer soaps made. There is a CucumberMelon and G’Oatmeal HoneyMoo (goat milk, oats & honey) on the racks. I’ll be working on a plain Honeymoo today and still have 9 other kinds of soap I sold out of that need to be restocked. It’ll keep me off the streets next month...that is, if there WERE any streets here. The closest pavement is 35 miles away.

The goats are due to freshen soon, so I won’t have to use my frozen milk from last year much longer. Milk in soap is skin nourishing and makes for a very creamy and moisturizing lather. 

It’s a very luxurious soap and goat milk is even a tad better than cow’s milk, as it is nearly the same PH as our skin. Cow’s milk is only very slightly more alkaline, although the Jersey Milk Soaps are my very best sellers. The milk offers alpha hydroxy acids which assist in gently removing dead skin cells, unlike harsh commercial soap.It also has proteins which kill acne producing bacteria. Milk soaps also tend to be highly moisturizing and beneficial to dry, flaky skin. In addition to this, they are loaded with vitamins and minerals that are able to be absorbed into the skin .

All soap is made with lye and fats or oils. The chemical reaction of combining them turns it into a type of ‘salt’. Oils and fats are made up of ‘triglycerides’. Combining them with an alkaline solution such as sodium or potassium hydroxide (lye) causes a chemical reaction known as saponification, which combines and becomes soap. Glycerine, a highly prized, skin softening humectant, is a natural by product of soap. Unfortunately, in commercial soap, this is processed out to use in more expensive beauty products, leaving the soap you buy in the store lacking any of the natural benefits of real, homemade soap.

There is an endless variety of oils that can be used in soaping. Each type of oil brings a different quality to the soap. Some are moisturizing, others create bubbles, some make a harder bar of soap...there are endless variations. Adding ingredients such as milk, aloe, or other liquids to the lye mix can add different properties as well. Top it all off with some nice essential oils or fragrances and/or a pretty color and it can feed more of your senses. For the fragrance allergic, I also make unscented soaps such as the Plain Honeymoo, Oatmeal/Honey/Milk bars and my famous beer soap (This Sud’s for You).

There is something there for everybody.

New and replacement soaps will be available in July. Until then there is a limited supply of Honeysuckle, ButtermilkAlmondMoo and a few variety bars.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of our active military, veterans, and their families for protecting us here at home and for protecting American interests throughout the world.

-Kim/Petey

                                                     

It's a Dirty Job

Things are hopping here at the ranch. The grass is growing, calves are being born, it's time for branding and lots of other dirty work.

The weather has been warm and I’ve been putting a lot of time into the garden. Along with the tomatoes, peas, squash and other veggies, I have started Calendulas,  and a few other herbs to use in soaping. I plan to start making some specialty soaps this year. Among them, needs to be a gardeners soap, as I am needing it pretty badly myself.

At any rate, it’s a great spring for making soap.

I was making a couple of logs of HoneyMoo to replenish what I had sold and my stick blender died just as I started mixing. There I was, in my mad scientist gear, everything combined in my ‘cauldron’ and holding a totally impotent stick blender. There was no turning back. I grabbed a whisk and began stirring. Just in case anyone is dying of curiosity, it takes about 2 1/2 hours of heavy stirring with a whisk to bring HoneyMoo soap to trace so you can pour it. This is an exciting undertaking when your wrists are already sore.

Into the freezer it went, to help keep it light, although there is nearly always some color where the honey heats up and causes a little gel. I rather like the look, myself.

A natural colored LilacMoo is off the racks and curing now, and as soon as the new emulsifier comes I’ll be jumping up to make soaps with summer scents and replenish my supply of the others. 

Thank you to all who participated in answering my poll questions and most especially to those who have purchased soap.

I still have a good supply of these soaps...

BlackRaspberryVanilla
Honeysuckle
ApricotLavender
KiwiLemongrass

MILK SOAPS:
ButtermilkAlmondMoo
BergaMoo

And restocking will commence with the arrival of the new stick blender!!!

A Little Poll

There are 3 aspects to soap.

Fragrance               scented or unscented

Appearance            natural or colored

Performance           cleansing, creamy, moisturizing

Shown above:
ButtermilkAlmondMoo/Unscented Honeymoo Bar & Boot

In what order are these aspects most important to you, on a scale of 1-10 - Ten being the highest?

Many of my milk soaps are of a natural color. Vegetable soaps and a few milk soaps have coloring added.

In addition, if you would take the time, would you let me know which of these scents most appeal to you?

Shown above:
KiwiLemongrass/BlackRaspberryVanilla/Honeysuckle

Almond


Lavender

Lilac

Honeysuckle

Brown Sugar

Bergamot

Lemongrass

Apple

Bay Rum

Unscented


Would you be interested in specialty soaps?

I make a beer soap that I love to use on my hair.
A "gardener's soap" is in the works as is a "kitchen soap".

Thanks in advance for taking your time to comment!

Petey/Kim

ranchrustics@me.com

THE STORY BEHIND 

RANCH RUSTICS HANDCRAFTED SOAPS

Handmade soap is  an inexpensive luxury. That may be an oxymoron, but its true. I love sinking into the warm, steamy, water of my claw leg tub, surrounded with the scent of lavender and a bar of soap that feels like drawing silk across my skin. It's a very decadent, lavish experience.

Not given to a lifetime of pampering myself, it has become an event that I look forward to every evening. After I began manifesting more symptoms of an immune system gone haywire, my skin began to suffer. It was often itchy, dried out easily and nothing seemed to help or soothe it. Out of desperation, I began to research things that might make a difference. For over 7 years, the idea of making my own soap had intrigued me, but I hadn't the courage to overcome my fear of lye. Deciding that for hundreds of years, women did make their own soap, using unstable ingredients and inconsistent outcomes, I decided if they could do it, so could I. I took the plunge.

I studied, read, followed internet boards, blogs and every other modality of information on soap making I could find. I slowly purchased the needed equipment over the course of time and appointed myself a date that I was going to begin. Randyman made me a couple of molds, I donned my goggles, elbow length hazmat gloves, bandana over my face bandito style and even added shoes to the ensemble, in the name of safety. I opened windows, locked out dogs, put a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the door and warned Randyman not to speak, touch, or otherwise engage me while I was immersed in the undertaking. I stepped into the kitchen in my soap making uniform and after glaring at him for his failure to suppress his hilarity and admonishing him for his "mad scientist' comment, I began.

I had already made several 'dry runs'.  My recipe and instructions were clearly displayed, my oils were measured, my lye was measured, all my equipment and ingredients were close at hand. With grave concentration and a few misgivings, I began.

Into the water, I began to pour my lye. Never, ever, do this the other way around. The lye must go into the water, not the water into the lye, or you risk spattering and serious burns. Lye is an extremely caustic material able to melt skin, oils, hair and other things on contact. That's why it is such an effective drain cleaner. As I slowly poured and stirred, I waited anxiously for the great toxic cloud of lye fumes. They began to rise and I turned my head away to gasp for breath before turning back to my work. Having kept the lye water in a stainless steel bowl in a sink full of cold water helped the fumes stop early and cooled the mix down quickly, as it had almost instantly shot up over 200 degrees. This is not child's play.

With a thermometer moving back and forth, my bucket of oils and pan of lye mix finally came close enough in temps for me to mix. I poured them together, watched them begin to emulsify almost immediately and began to stir with my stick blender. It didn't take long before I reached what is known as 'trace' and I added my lavender essential oil to the mix, poured it all into my freezer paper lined molds and spirited them away to the back room where I insulated it all with towels.

I took off my uniform, tossing the bandana and goggles nonchalantly on the kitchen table. I pulled off my gloves and went to look in the mirror. There was definitely a change. I was now a 'soaper'. I had conquered and prevailed. Tomorrow night would tell me if I was victorious or not.

The following night, I pulled the molds out from under their insulation and was able to pull the soap log out. I cut them into bars, eyes rolling in ecstasy as I inhaled the lavender wafting from the bars. Now I had to wait but two more weeks to see if the product was worth all the effort.

It was.

The end product was unlike any soap I had ever tried. It left my skin feeling not just clean, but silky smooth and moisturized.  There was a definite difference. I began to experiment with some different formulations. Each type of oil brings a different quality to soap. Some are moisturizing, some make great bubbles, others creamy lather, yet others are super cleansing. After several months of testing, working on soap calculators and trying things out,  I had pretty much fine tuned my formula to what i wanted. I added milk, which nearly matches the PH of our own skin and it made the bars superior.
All these bring qualities that I really liked. I think you will too.

All my soaps are handmade and hand cut, right here at the ranch. The milk soaps are made with milk from my own Nubian goats and Jersey cow. Some soaps even have organic ingredients that grow right here in our pastures.

Soaps are made with combinations of lard, tallow or vegetable shortening, lye, olive oil, coconut oil, apricot kernel oil, palm kernel oil, castor oil, cocoa butter, shea butter and essential or fragrance oils.
Specialty soaps may have additional ingredients such as egg, honey,  beer, pumpkin, milk, pine tar or nettle tea.
Glycerin is a natural, skin conditioning, by-product of homemade soap. In commercial soap it is extracted to be used in more expensive beauty products leaving the soap more of a detergent which strips the natural oils out of skin and hair. All soap, commercial or artisan, is made with lye and fats. That is what soap is. After combining, the chemical reaction turns the lye and fats to soap, which is technically a salt!

Granma's old lye soap, however, used lye made from wood ashes, which was very unstable and she was unable to weigh out the oils and measure to 1/10 of an ounce to produce a consistently safe and usable product. Today we have  stable and consistent ingredients to work with and  can confidently turn out a luxury soap time after time.