I had the day off from work today, and this afternoon I made a batch of soap.

As a co-leader of this summer’s LEAMIS trip to Kenya, I won’t be taking the lead role on the soapmaking workshop, or any other cottage industry workshop. But I will need to mentor the teammate who will be teaching it. And we’ll also need to take a few samples of homemade soap, since the soap we make during the workshop will be uncured and can’t be used while we’re there.

Since this is to be a simple soap, I used lard, not any frou-frou oils like palm or coconut or olive. I did add some essential oils for fragrance; in fact, I added too much of the second oil because I was expecting it to have a drip top like the first bottle I tried.

I stirred it by hand, like our Kenyan students will have to do, rather than using a stick blender, which cuts the time down to almost nothing. Even so, it came to trace pretty quickly.

I hope that my lye-to-fat ratio is OK; the inexpensive kitchen scale I had to buy is not calibrated as finely as I had intended, and I had to eyeball the correct amount of lye more than I would normally prefer. If the soap turns out badly — powdery and crumbly, indicating too much lye, or soft and squishy, indicating too much fat — I can rebatch it and add a little more of the missing ingredient.

I used the quantities from the handout from my 2006 Kenya trip, but it didn’t seem to make much. I may need to make another batch later this week, and I may double those quantities. I can’t wait too much longer, since the soap will need to have cured by the time we get to Kenya.

The bars are now insulated, in what we call “gel stage”; they should be solid enough to unmold in the next few days, and then I’ll know better whether the batch turned out correctly.