DIY Artisanal Soaps (Adams Media, 2016), by Alicia Grosso equips readers with everything they need to begin making their own beautiful soaps right at home. Grosso lists the main ingredients needed, plus recipes on how to personalize your soaps to be perfect for your home. In this excerpt, she explains how to make your own laundry soap.
Since you won’t be using this soap on your hands, you can use an all-coconut, completely saponified recipe. You can add essential or fragrance oil, if you like. You can even buy fragrance oil that smells like a famous detergent.
Ingredients:
• 1 pound soap
• 8 ounces water
• 4 pounds coconut oil
• 1–3 tablespoons essential oil or fragrance oil (optional)
Instructions:
1. Make the batch as usual.
2. Cut the block into small pieces and spread them out on a drying rack.
3. When those pieces are dry and firm, run them through the grater blade on your food processor.
4. Spread the shreds out to dry. When they are very brittle, whirl them ½ cup at a time in the bowl of the food processor, using the regular blade, to make a powder. (Don’t process them too long or they’ll compact back into a solid mass.)
5. Store the soap powder in an airtight container.
For a fragrant and reusable dryer sheet, make your own! Cut a white cotton terry hand towel into six equally sized pieces. Keep them by the dryer. Put about 10 drops of essential oil on a piece of the fabric when you want to use one. Simply toss into the dryer as you would a disposable sheet.
More from: DIY Artisanal Soaps
• DIY Basic Cold Process Soap
• DIY Liquid Soap in a Slow Cooker
• Using Colors in Homemade Hand Soaps
Excerpted from DIY Artisanal Soaps: Make Your Own Custom, Handcrafted Soaps! by Alicia Grosso. Copyright © 2016 Adams Media, a division of Simon and Schuster, Inc. Used by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved. Interior images © iStockphoto.com.