It’s been about a month since I made my first soap of 2007, and I tried a bar tonight. It seems OK. I should have made more by now, but haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe tomorrow night, or Thursday. The batch I tried tonight I may share with family, but from here forward I’ll probably make all-lard soap that I can save for samples for the Bolivia trip. The pure lard soap doesn’t have as much fluffy lather as the soap with coconut, palm and olive oil in it, but it’s the closest analogue to what they’ll have available in Bolivia.

I think I took some mixed-oil soaps last year among my samples, without thinking it through, and later I wondered if my students would be disappointed when their soap didn’t lather as well.

I sometimes forget that the people who read this blog only occasionally, or who have only recently found it, may not know what I’m talking about. (Sometimes I have no idea what I’m talking about.)

Anyway, here’s the back story about some of my recent posts referencing soapmaking, Spanish and mission trips.

I have taken foreign mission trips through LEAMIS International Ministries, a small, non-denominational missions agency based in Sewanee, Tenn., since 2003.

In 2003, we went to Nicaragua, for a relatively routine construction-and-visitation trip. For me, it was a great introduction to foreign short-term missions. But the founders of LEAMIS wanted to break out of the construction mold for such short-term trips.

In 2004, 2005 and 2006, I traveled to Kenya with LEAMIS as the agency moved to a cottage industry approach. I and my fellow volunteers taught simple skills which the people of our host churches could use to produce a marketable product. In 2004, I taught a craft called copper foiling, but I had doubts about whether it was really practical as a cottage industry.

In 2005, because LEAMIS would be working simultaneously at two sites in Kenya, I was asked to teach cold process soapmaking. I knew nothing about it, but I was trained by Carolyn Schussler, the volunteer who would be teaching it at the other site. I taught soapmaking again in 2006, all by myself.

This year, LEAMIS is not planning a team trip to Kenya. LEAMIS has not abandoned Kenya and will be making some smaller trips this year to install water purification systems. I am sure they’ll do another cottage industry trip in the future.

LEAMIS is doing a trip to Bolivia, in South America, this summer, and I will be a part of it. I am now raising money for the trip. Task assignments haven’t been finalized, but the assumption seems to be that I will teach soapmaking again, so I am working in that direction. It is, however, always possible that the host church will request something different.

We still need team members for the Bolivia trip; contact me or LEAMIS if you are interested.

At Ash Wednesday service tonight, Rev. Dr. Doyle gave us a caution I’d never heard before. He suggested that, when it came time to wipe the imposed ashes from our forehead, we should use a dry cloth first to collect most of the ashes before going to a wet washrag. The idea is that ashes are closely related to lye, and can burn your eyes. I don’t think this is a serious problem — I’ve never had any ill effects from imposed ashes before — but it’s probably good better-safe-than-sorry advice.

Anyway, I had to smile because I knew that I’d be exposed to lye in a much more potent form after coming home from the service. I made my first batch of soap in ages tonight. It was pretty haphazard — the blend of oils wasn’t carefully calculated but was based on emptying my existing bottle of plain, non-virgin olive oil, then adding some lard because there wasn’t very much olive oil, then adding some palm and coconut oils for lather. (You must not go overboard on the coconut oil; it adds lots of bubbly lather, but in soap form, it dries out your skin.) I was eyeballing my additions, but I did keep track of how much I had added using a digital scale. I kept notes on how many grams of each oil I had added, and then plugged them into SoapCalc to find out how much lye and water I needed. I threw in my last few drops of blueberry fragrance oil, although it’s likely that the scent won’t survive the curing process.

I used little round Glad-Lock containers for molds. The soaps are now going through gel stage in an insulated mylar bag. I threw the empty fragrance oil bottle into the bag before closing it up because, well, it couldn’t hurt.

Future batches will be a little better thought out; this one was just for fun, to get me back into the habit.

The bars will be solid and can be popped out of their molds within a few days. But when you use cold process, you aren’t supposed to use the soap for a month to six weeks, on the off chance that there are any tiny specks of un-saponified lye lurking inside. I have heard of some soapmakers who follow those guidelines faithfully for any soap they sell or give away, but for their own use they sometimes take the risk of using the soap sooner, especially if it’s just as a hand soap.

While they are curing, the soaps may develop a dull powdery coating. This is harmless soda ash, and can easily be shaved or rinsed off before the soaps are used.

I probably need to make 100 percent lard soap for most of the samples I end up taking to Bolivia, since it’s most likely that my students will be making lard or beef tallow soap rather than using a bunch of different frou-frou oils. (In Kenya, which isn’t much of a pork producer, beef tallow was the fat of choice.)

I hope to make some soap this week. I haven’t made any since back before the last Kenya trip, and I hadn’t gotten around to replacing my stainless steel stock pot or other items that I left (on purpose) with the church in Ndonyo. But I need to get back into practice and start building up some samples I can take with me to Bolivia this summer.

I also need to make some more soap for the family, surprisingly enough. In 2005, I gave all the adult women in the family homemade soap but thought of it as a one-time thing. But Mike and Kelly said last week in California that they had run out and wanted me to send them some more. Daniel calls it “Uncle John Soap.”