soap making essentials

i would like to know how saponification ratios are worked out if you dont have access to a chart of known values?

what?

The Amish take great pride in their traditional lifestyle and they also take great pride in their woodworking skills, passed on from generation to generation. After being a secret for hundreds of years, Amish furniture is now prized the world over for its beauty and durability, handcrafted from hardwoods such as red oak and maple for lasting value. In addition, the Amish specialize in certain pieces that modern factories can’t duplicate, such as very large dining tables, bentwood rockers, and clock cases. All of this comes naturally to this unique culture, because furniture making has always been integral to the Amish identity and economy.

In the late 1600s, the Amish splintered from the Mennonites. Both were Anabaptists who believed in adult baptism and strict rules of conduct, and they were often persecuted in Europe. They took to heart a verse in the Bible from II Corinthians 6:17: “Come out from among them and be ye separate, saith the Lord.” So they formed their own farming communities and learned to be self-sufficient, making their own furniture, candles, cloth, and tools. Even staying to themselves, the Amish people were persecuted in Switzerland, Germany, and other parts of Europe. When William Penn claimed that his new state across the Atlantic would offer religious freedom, they fled to America around 1730.

Now the Amish live in 220 different settlements in 22 US States, plus Ontario, Canada, but most people are familiar with their large communities in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania and Ohio. The Amish shun modern conveniences in everyday life and only use telephones and public transportation when it is absolutely essential. They adhere to strict codes of dress and conduct, and they believe in hard work, frugality, and living in harmony with nature. This austere lifestyle is balanced by a vibrant artistic vision that has created memorable works of art in furniture, ceramics, weaving, and quilting. The love of manual labor and a respect for rural traditions has resulted in homespun crafts that are eagerly sought by the rest of the world.

Throughout the centuries, there have been memorable schools of Amish-Mennonite furniture makers in the US, such as the Soap Hollow craftsmen and the Jonestown movement. Many of these pioneer woodworkers used geometric patterns and simple compass spirals, as well as flowers, birds, and other representational motifs. Today the Amish build solid wood furniture in all kinds of styles, from Mission to Bon Bell, French Country, McCoy, Adirondack and Chippendale. But they have never lost track of their humble beginnings. In fact, being humble and productive are canons of the Amish faith, and so is passing on skills and knowledge.

For an Amish child, schooling in a one-room schoolhouse or home usually ends after the eighth grade, and that is when many of them become apprentices to master craftsmen. They learn how to hew, join, and sand wood products the old-fashioned way, with never a shortcut taken for the sake of convenience. There are not any smokestacks or assembly lines in an Amish community. The person building a bentwood rocking chair has no doubt built hundreds of them, starting during his apprentice years and working up to the status of master craftsman. One artisan might specialize in a particular piece of furniture, such as corner cabinets, making them all one at a time, by himself. Other craftsmen work together in the communal spirit for which the Amish are famous, creating furniture that’s intended to last a lifetime. Each piece is unique.

Although they always meet the needs of their community first, the Amish are accustomed to selling goods to the general population. The discovery of folk and decorative arts during the 1920s gave a big push to the popularity of Amish oak furniture, and sales have produced a positive cash flow ever since. Not even their famous roadside stands that offer fruits and vegetables, crafts, and kitchen goods can equal the welcome income from furniture. The Amish do not need much from the outside world, but a little cash is always useful to buy raw materials. Online shopping has made their unique creations even more accessible to the rest of the world, but the buyer should beware. There are poor-quality fakes of Amish furniture on the market, often made in China.

One good way to find the genuine article is to look for the unique family-centered traditions of real Amish furniture. The Amish have large families who enjoy dining together, plus they often worship in their homes and educate their children there. Therefore, they have a fondness for large tables with many leaves. Most Amish homes have movable interior walls to allow placement of a large table, seating 22 or more. Many businesses have found that sturdy Amish tables are more practical for the conference room or meeting areas than regular office furniture. Remember that the Amish create unique benches, hutches, sideboards, corner cabinets, and other accessories that are not found in the catalog of a typical furniture company. That’s how to tell them apart.

Remember that the Amish lifestyle is one of choice. They are Anabaptists, which means they practice adult baptism instead of infant baptism. This is an important distinction, because only adults can make an informed decision about being baptized and committing to the Amish faith. Before they are baptized, teenagers are encouraged to sample life in the outside world in an experimental period called rumspringa. That translates to “running around” in the old Pennsylvania Deutsch tongue. The youths are still bound by their traditional rules, but they are in the outside world, living, dressing, and behaving as regular young people. It is a good chance to find out how the rest of the world lives, so they will not be curious about it for the rest of their lives. Rumspringa is over when the young person decides to be baptized into the church and stay permanently in Amish society. Roughly, 80% choose to remain Amish.

So the Amish woodworker has made a conscious decision to excel at this time-honored craft, by building handsome furniture today and by educating young people to carry on the tradition. With the belief that manual labor is a virtue, comes the certainty that every piece of furniture is a testament to Amish faith and skill.

Freelance Writer
http://www.articlesbase.com/home-improvement-articles/amish-oak-furniture-a-result-of-austere-lifestyle-88061.html

This video will show you the chemisty of soap making. For more information, visit www.how2soap.com.

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well ive started making some soaps and i really like it but im confused on how i should sell them?

You can get a soap making business book (used) for under $10 at Amazon.com. The advantage to this is getting advice from soap making experts on how to package, price and where to sell your soap products for the best results.

To sell online, you may be better off starting to sell on an established website like Etsy.com, which already gets lots of traffic everyday from customers looking for craft products to buy.

To sell locally in your area, you may want to partner with a local salon or spa, whose customers may be interested in your soap products. Offer the business owner a cut of the profits and maybe some free soaps to try, so they can help market your soaps.

On Washing HandsBy Atul Gawande

Author of Better

One ordinary December day, I took a tour of my hospital with Deborah Yokoe, an infectious disease specialist, and Susan Marino, a microbiologist. They work in our hospital’s infection-control unit. Their full-time job, and that of three others in the unit, is to stop the spread of infection in the hospital. This is not flashy work, and they are not flashy people. Yokoe is forty-five years old, gentle voiced, and dimpled. She wears sneakers at work. Marino is in her fifties and reserved by nature. But they have coped with influenza epidemics, Legionnaires’ disease, fatal bacterial meningitis, and, just a few months before, a case that, according to the patient’s brain-biopsy results, might have been Creutzfeld-Jakob disease — a nightmare, not only because it is incurable and fatal but also because the infectious agent that causes it, known as a prion, cannot be killed by usual heat-sterilization procedures. By the time the results came back, the neurosurgeon’s brain-biopsy instruments might have transferred the disease to other patients, but infection-control team members tracked the instruments down in time and had them chemically sterilized. Yokoe and Marino have seen measles, the plague, and rabbit fever (which is caused by a bacterium that is extraordinarily contagious in hospital laboratories and feared as a bioterrorist weapon). They once instigated a nationwide recall of frozen strawberries, having traced a hepatitis A outbreak to a batch served at an ice cream social. Recently at large in the hospital, they told me, have been a rotavirus, a Norwalk virus, several strains of Pseudomonas bacteria, a superresistant Klebsiella, and the ubiquitous scourges of modern hospitals — resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus faecalis, which are a frequent cause of pneumonias, wound infections, and bloodstream infections.

Each year, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, two million Americans acquire an infection while they are in the hospital. Ninety thousand die of that infection. The hardest part of the infection-control team’s job, Yokoe says, is not coping with the variety of contagions they encounter or the panic that sometimes occurs among patients and staff. Instead, their greatest difficulty is getting clinicians like me to do the one thing that consistently halts the spread of infections: wash our hands.

There isn’t much they haven’t tried. Walking about the surgical floors where I admit my patients, Yokoe and Marino showed me the admonishing signs they have posted, the sinks they have repositioned, the new ones they have installed. They have made some sinks automated. They have bought special five-thousand-dollar “precaution carts” that store everything for washing up, gloving, and gowning in one ergonomic, portable, and aesthetically pleasing package. They have given away free movie tickets to the hospital units with the best compliance. They have issued hygiene report cards. Yet still, we have not mended our ways. Our hospital’s statistics show what studies everywhere else have shown — that we doctors and nurses wash our hands one-third to one-half as often as we are supposed to. Having shaken hands with a sniffling patient, pulled a sticky dressing off someone’s wound, pressed a stethoscope against a sweating chest, most of us do little more than wipe our hands on our white coats and move on — to see the next patient, to scribble a note in the chart, to grab some lunch.

This is, embarrassingly, nothing new: In 1847, at the age of twenty-eight, the Viennese obstetrician Ignac Semmelweis famously deduced that, by not washing their hands consistently or well enough, doctors were themselves to blame for childbed fever. Childbed fever, also known as puerperal fever, was the leading cause of maternal death in childbirth in the era before antibiotics (and before the recognition that germs are the agents of infectious disease). It is a bacterial infection — most commonly caused by Streptococcus, the same bacteria that causes strep throat — that ascends through the vagina to the uterus after childbirth. Out of three thousand mothers who delivered babies at the hospital where Semmelweis worked, six hundred or more died of the disease each year — a horrifying 20 percent maternal death rate. Of mothers delivering at home, only 1 percent died. Semmelweis concluded that doctors themselves were carrying the disease between patients, and he mandated that every doctor and nurse on his ward scrub with a nail brush and chlorine between patients. The puerperal death rate immediately fell to 1 percent — incontrovertible proof, it would seem, that he was right. Yet elsewhere, doctors’ practices did not change. Some colleagues were even offended by his claims; it was impossible to them that doctors could be killing their patients. Far from being hailed, Semmelweis was ultimately dismissed from his job.

Semmelweis’s story has come down to us as Exhibit A in the case for the obstinacy and blindness of physicians. But the story was more complicated. The trouble was partly that nineteenth-century physicians faced multiple, seemingly equally powerful explanations for puerperal fever. There was, for example, a strong belief that miasmas of the air in hospitals were the cause. And Semmelweis strangely refused to either publish an explanation of the logic behind his theory or prove it with a convincing experiment in animals. Instead, he took the calls for proof as a personal insult and attacked his detractors viciously.

“You, Herr Professor, have been a partner in this massacre,” he wrote to one University of Vienna obstetrician who questioned his theory. To a colleague in Wurzburg he wrote, “Should you, Herr Hofrath, without having disproved my doctrine, continue to teach your pupils [against it], I declare before God and the world that you are a murderer and the ‘History of Childbed Fever’ would not be unjust to you if it memorialized you as a medical Nero.” His own staff turned against him. In Pest, where he relocated after losing his post in Vienna, he would stand next to the sink and berate anyone who forgot to scrub his or her hands. People began to purposely evade, sometimes even sabotage, his hand-washing regimen. Semmelweis was a genius, but he was also a lunatic, and that made him a failed genius. It was another twenty years before Joseph Lister offered his clearer, more persuasive, and more respectful plea for antisepsis in surgery in the British medical journal Lancet.

One hundred and forty years of doctors’ plagues later, however, you have to wonder whether what’s needed to stop them is precisely a lunatic. Consider what Yokoe and Marino are up against. No part of human skin is spared from bacteria. Bacterial counts on the hands range from five thousand to five million colony-forming units per square centimeter. The hair, underarms, and groin harbor greater concentrations. On the hands, deep skin crevices trap 10 to 20 percent of the flora, making removal difficult, even with scrubbing, and sterilization impossible. The worst place is under the fingernails. Hence the recent CDC guidelines requiring hospital personnel to keep their nails trimmed to less than a quarter of an inch and to remove artificial nails.

Plain soaps do, at best, a middling job of disinfecting. Their detergents remove loose dirt and grime, but fifteen seconds of washing reduces bacterial counts by only about an order of magnitude. Semmelweis recognized that ordinary soap was not enough and used a chlorine solution to achieve disinfection. Today’s antibacterial soaps contain chemicals such as chlorhexidine to disrupt microbial membranes and proteins. Even with the right soap, however, proper hand washing requires a strict procedure. First, you must remove your watch, rings, and other jewelry (which are notorious for trapping bacteria). Next, you wet your hands in warm tap water. Dispense the soap and lather all surfaces, including the lower one-third of the arms, for the full duration recommended by the manufacturer (usually fifteen to thirty seconds). Rinse off for thirty full seconds. Dry completely with a clean, disposable towel. Then use the towel to turn the tap of. Repeat after any new contact with a patient.

Almost no one adheres to this procedure. It seems impossible. On morning rounds, our residents check in on twenty patients in an hour. The nurses in our intensive care units typically have a similar number of contacts with patients requiring hand washing in between. Even if you get the whole cleansing process down to a minute per patient, that’s still a third of staff time spent just washing hands. Such frequent hand washing can also irritate the skin, which can produce a dermatitis, which itself increases bacterial counts.

Less irritating than soap, alcohol rinses and gels have been in use in Europe for almost two decades but for some reason only recently caught on in the United States. They take far less time to use — only about fifteen seconds or so to rub a gel over the hands and fingers and let it air-dry. Dispensers can be put at the bedside more easily than a sink. And at alcohol concentrations of 50 to 95 percent, they are more effective at killing organisms, too. (Interestingly, pure alcohol is not as effective — at least some water is required to denature microbial proteins.)

Still, it took Yokoe over a year to get our staff to accept the 60 percent alcohol gel we have recently adopted. Its introduction was first blocked because of the staff’s fears that it would produce noxious building air. (It didn’t.) Next came worries that, despite evidence to the contrary, it would be more irritating to the skin. So a product with aloe was brought in. People complained about the smell. So the aloe was taken out. Then some of the nursing staff refused to use the gel after rumors spread that it would reduce fertility. The rumors died only after the infection-control unit circulated evidence that the alcohol is not systemically absorbed and a hospital fertility specialist endorsed the use of the gel.

With the gel finally in wide use, the compliance rates for proper hand hygiene improved substantially: from around 40 percent to 70 percent. But — and this is the troubling finding — hospital infection rates did not drop one iota. Our 70 percent compliance just wasn’t good enough. If 30 percent of the time people didn’t wash their hands, that still left plenty of opportunity to keep transmitting infections. Indeed, the rates of resistant Staphylococcus and Enterococcus infections continued to rise. Yokoe receives the daily tabulations. I checked with her one day not long ago, and sixty-three of our seven hundred hospital patients were colonized or infected with MRSA (the shorthand for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) and another twenty-two had acquired VRE (vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus) — unfortunately, typical rates of infection for American hospitals.

Rising infection rates from superresistant bacteria have become the norm around the world. The first outbreak of VRE did not occur until 1988, when a renal dialysis unit in England became infested. By 1990, the bacteria had been carried abroad, and four in one thousand American ICU patients had become infected. By 1997, a stunning 23 percent of ICU patients were infected. When the virus for SARS — severe acute respiratory syndrome — appeared in China in 2003 and spread within weeks to almost ten thousand people in two dozen countries across the world (10 percent of whom were killed), the primary vector for transmission was the hands of health care workers. What will happen if (or rather, when) an even more dangerous organism appears — avian flu, say, or a new, more virulent bacteria? “It will be a disaster,” Yokoe says.

Copyright © 2007 Atul Gawande from the book Better Published by Metropolitan Books; April 2007;$24.00US/$30.00CAN; 978-0-8050-8211-1

Atul Gawande
http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/on-washing-hands-125526.html

I really want to start making different kinds of soap and bath scrubs but every place I have found the ingredients online seems to be pretty pricey. Does anybody know of a good place to buy the ingredients?

Welcome to the addiction!!

If you’re planning on making cold process soaps you can get many of your ingredients right from the grocery store.

Olive Oil, Lard, Crisco, Grapeseed Oil. Castor Oil can be purchased at the Pharmacy. Lye from some hardware stores (in the plumbing isle…must say 100% sodium hydroxide or caustic soda)

As for online suppliers, here are is a link to a page I made with tons of suppliers that sell everything you need for making soap, whether it’s cold process or melt and pour.

http://www.soap-making-essentials.com/soap-making-suppliers.html

New Directions has really good prices and a large selection.

Mountain Rose herbs has pretty good prices, especially when you take into account that alot of their stuff is organic.

From Nature with Love has a large selection as well as good prices too.

Check out the link….there are over 50 great places to get supplies from. You should be able to find a place fairly close to you (saves on shipping).

Good luck and have fun!

Tips on saving money weekly can be done easily. There are many ways to save; buy doing some of the following item.

Staying away from the rent to own places will save you money weekly and a lot when the item is paid for. If you are in a business, the computer goes out and has to be in the shop for a week, and you just can’t be without it; going to rent to own is possibly going to save your business. Let them know ahead of time it is only temporary so rent a used one not one that is new. You’d be saving money on a weekly basis because your business could lose money during that week.

Saving money at what time you visit the grocery store by going weekly instead of two or three times a week. Don’t go grocery shopping when you’re hungry because every thing will look good and you’ll end up buying things you don’t need.

Recycle your plastic grocery bags by using them to line your wastebasket. Why buy

Use liners each week for the wastebasket when you can use grocery bags that you got free when you did the shopping.

Watch the sales when shopping. Save on a weekly basis by stocking up on items that are needed when they are on sale this will save you weekly as well as monthly.

Driving into town once or twice, a week instead of three or four times will save you money. Making a list of things that need to be done; and do more than one thing while you’re in town. Go to the doctor, grocery store or pay bills all on the same day instead of making three trips you’re only making one. You’ll be saving money for gas, the wear on the car as well as time.

Laundry can be very expensive when making a trip to the laundry mat each week. Check out the used appliance stores in your area, buy a washer, and dry even if you have to pay $50.00 a month for 6 months. You’ll be saving by not spending $25.00 to $30.00 a week depending on the size of your family versus $50.00 a month. Having your own washer and dryer can save you gasoline, time, and money when you only have enough cloth to fill half a washer or dryer.

Saving money at home on a weekly basis at what time, you are doing the laundry by doing a full load at a time instead of one or two items. You’ll save here on laundry soap, fabric softener and energy doing a full load of cloths instead on a half a load.

Recycling your used fabric sheets after drying your cloths is a way to save money weekly. Put them into a baggie and use those to dust with saving you the expense of buy furniture polish every week or two. They can also be used to clean soap scum from the shower doors too.

If you have, access to a dishwasher saves by using it once a day or three times a week. Don’t run the dishwasher with just a few items make sure it is full. Dishwashers use less water too versus doing dishes by hand two or three times a day. Doing one full load once a day will save you on dish soap and water:

Save money on a weekly basis by drinking water instead of pop. Don’t buy your water get a water purifier to attach to the kitchen fasuet or a pitcher to run your drinking through. This will save you money not having to buy your water and is better for your health.

Martin Lukac
http://www.articlesbase.com/investing-articles/tips-on-saving-money-weekly-113504.html

We just ended up getting an unexpeceted expence, and since I already make soap for personal use, it it would be feasable to make a significant dent in our monthly bills by selling homemade soaps.

you can definitely make that much or more. wholesome, natural, handmade products are in high demand. everyone is becoming health conscious. the key will be to get the word out about your product and find a good vehicle to sell (kiosk at a mall, small space at a boutique, website, craft show, etc.)

i don’t know how long it would take to get things going, though… best to you!

We want to make homemade soap but most recipes call for tallow. I did not like making the tallow. Can anyone help? Any other recipes that make white soap would be wonderful! Thanks!

Below is a Good basic recipe that is easy to measure because you use a standard 3# can of Crisco as a base.

*Rachael’s "Tried and True" Recipe (Thanks! to Rachael Levitan)
48 ounces Crisco (a 3-pound can)
21 ounces Soybean Oil (or Olive, Canola, or a blend of these)
18 ounces Coconut Oil
28 ounces of cold water
12 ounces lye crystals
Temperatures: 100 degrees

Trace by hand should be in about 20 minutes. Cure about 24-48 hours before cutting.

This recipe comes from Kathy Millers website : http://www.millersoap.com

THis is the 1st and only recipe i’ve used – as it has oils that I can find locally. Kathy also has other recipes on her site as well as successfully hints and helps for making milk soaps, where to find lye, scents, colorants, ect., a trouble shooting page, soapy success page and much much more.

Essential oils, dyes, sodium hydroxide, etc. Is there a single source or do I have to go running all over creation?

I’d try calling your local craft stores to see if they have what you’re looking for. You could also try searching online. Not sure what area you’re in, but found one place you might like. Good Luck! : )