My husband’s work decided to change their uniform shirts. They are now required to wear high visibility vests and/or shirts instead of their usual darker colored shirts. First off the darker shirts were nice because they hid any stains! But now with bright lime green and blaze orange I have to deal with the stains more as they show up easily with the light color.
I tried several commercial made stain removers without great success. I also only use one of two laundry detergents as they are highest rated with the Consumer Reports Company. (a company I really believe in) So it’s only Tide or Whisk for my family. However I may purchase Gain if I have a coupon to be used on towels and bedding where I’m not dealing with tough to remove stains. But that’s another story…..
So I decided to make this stain stick but it also works great as a general cleaning bar of soap. It’s especially useful in getting dirt, grease, grime out of the grooves of your fingerprints on your fingers! You would be shocked and it’s perfect for those gardening and digging in the dirt.
It’s been amazing for the hubbies work uniform shirts. I do try to soak them in a bucket with oxiclean but for grease stains or other dirt stains I do give it a good scrub with a medium bristle brush with this coconut oil soap.
Now onto the soap…. Because this is used on laundry I didn’t want to scent this soap. Now another unique thing about this soap is it’s superfat.
The ingredients are simple,
* Water
* Sodium Hydroxide,
* Coconut Oil.
I prefer soapcalc as my lye calculator so feel free to enter your recipe in the lye calculator you are most comfortable with. You want 100% coconut oil so decide how big or small you want your batch to be. Because this soap is going to get hard I don’t want to have to cut it, so I prefer to use individual silicone molds. They come in many shapes and sizes. I like the round ones from WSP or BB, but you can use whatever you have. But I do recommend not having to cut these soaps or they may crumble just because they are so hard even using full water (liquid).
Now once you have entered the amount of coconut oil you want to use, you want to drop your superfat percent down to zero. You may be wondering why you want to do this when coconut oil is already cleansing and drying to the skin. The reason why is that I don’t want that small percent of oils that would be leftover with say the normal 5% superfat on the fabric of my clothes. So I want to use the correct amount of lye to zero out all the oil used to make this soap. If you are concerned about a lye heavy soap just use a few extra grams of oil when you are measuring it out, but it won’t be lye heavy with a 0 superfat.
Because this is a very cleansing soap I do like to use blue nitrile gloves when it use it. But you can use latex gloves, plastic food service type gloves or even reusable gloves like the ones Playtex makes often sold where dish soap is sold. Whatever your preference is for gloves when you are cleaning.
Make your soap as usual. When I make this soap I don’t do a liquid (water) discount and use less water. It makes a hard bar and it just gets harder as the excess liquid evaporates out.
In this recipe I am not giving instructions on how to make cold process soap as I expect those that read this and want to make it already know how to make CP soap and make it safely handling the lye aka sodium hydroxide. If you have never made soap before I suggest you begin with reading up on how to make soap safely first.
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