Here’s a step by step tutorial for how to make homemade soap, along with a lye soap recipe, pictures, a video tutorial and helpful tips for making homemade lye soap! This homemade soap is a luxurious treat and it’s fun and creative to make your own homemade soap! I also sell my homemade lye soap if you like my examples!
How To Make Homemade Soap
If you want to learn how to make homemade soap, be sure to check out my How To Make Homemade Soap Youtube Channel! If you’d like more detailed step by step instructions for making homemade soap, you can also get my How to Make Homemade Soap for Beginners E-course! Everything you want to know about how to make lye soap is in there!
You can also purchase my homemade lye soaps by following this link.
I have included several links for places to get lye soap supplies. The places that I use the most right now are:
I use Amazon for lye soap supplies like my mixing buckets, stick blender and thermometer.
My Love Affair With Homemade Soap
I’ve always been fascinated with old fashioned homemade soap. I don’t know if it’s the lover of all things pioneer in me or what, but I’ve just always thought homemade soap was cool. When I graduated from high school, I went to Silver Dollar City in Branson and saw their soapmaker work and I was in love!
It was just so cool how they had this huge pot of homemade soap boiling and it turned into lye soap after 3 hours. Then, a few hours later, after it had set up in the molds we could buy it and take it home! ( I later learned this is hot process soap but I’m going to give you directions in this post for cold process soap.)
After high school, I got a job as a dried floral florist in Estes Park, Colorado and, at the same place, we made homemade soap. So I did a LOT of stirring at that job and loved it. We didn’t have stick hand blenders back then so you had to just stir the soap by hand for 30 minutes to an hour, but it was worth it. I just loved all the different smells and colors and additives like lavender that always made the homemade soap smell so good.
Flash forward a few years: A marriage and a few kids later we went back to Silver Dollar City and I saw the soapmaker again. I told her I wanted to get back into soapmaking only to have her tell me that you couldn’t make lye soap at home anymore. Apparently, some governments outlawed selling lye at the hardware store because people were using it to make meth. I was just heartbroken.
Well, 22 yrs. after I first made lye soap at that shop, I’m back at it again. I just happened to go to my local hardware store last fall to see if I could get lye drain cleaner and, to my delight I discovered it was available again! And…. I’ve been making homemade soap and making more soap and making even more soap! I mean I now have a LOT of soap. I don’t know why I like this soap so much. I guess just all the smells and colors and the HUGE variety of homemade soaps you can make!
So today I’m going to give you my very basic homemade soap recipes. I’m making some pretty fancy soaps now but there is just nothing like a good bar of old fashioned lye soap. I will share some pictures of the homemade soaps I’ve been working on below!
How To Make Lye Soap
Before making lye soap, be sure to wear gloves, long sleeves and goggles to prevent burns from the lye if you should accidentally spill or splash it on yourself. If you get lye on yourself, don’t panic. It’s not going to melt off your skin or anything. Just flush with water and wash off with soap. Be extra careful to never get the lye in your eyes. If you do get it in your eyes, then you should seek medical attention immediately. If you get lye on your skin, just be sure to flush your skin with a lot of water. If you happen to get a small burn, treat it as you would any other burn and put aloe or other burn cream on it.
You can use any kind of mold that you like to make your homemade soap. Now that I do a lot of soapmaking, I use silicone molds, but you can use a box, cardboard box, drawer organizer or anything like that. If you want to calculate the volume of your mold you can find out how to do that here.
This recipe is for a 1 1/2 lb. batch of homemade soap. The 1 1/2 lbs. is the amount of oil you use in your soap. If you have a bigger or smaller mold, be sure to run your soap through a lye calculator like this one. Each oil uses lye differently so you need to do this every time you change your lye soap recipe and add or take away oils. Everything is measured by weight.
This lye soap recipe is one of my most basic homemade soap recipes. You can find lots more homemade soap recipes in my e-course here!
Lye Soap Recipe
all measurements by weight
Lye – 3.22 oz. (Found at small hardware stores sold as drain cleaner. Look for “100% lye” on the bottle.)
Distilled Water – 7.92 oz. (Very hard tap water can make your soap slimy, so distilled works best.)
Lard – 24 oz.
essential oil 1-2 oz. (optional)
If you aren’t using a silicone mold, line your mold with a trash bag or a grocery sack with the inside of the bag toward the soap (so the print on the sack doesn’t get on your soap). The bag will keep your soap from sticking to your mold.
Don’t forget to put on your safety goggles and gloves before you mix the lye and water.
Measure the lye and water in separate containers. Pour the lye into the water. (NEVER, EVER POUR THE WATER INTO THE LYE!! It can cause dangerous reactions.)
When you pour the lye into the water, the mixture will get very hot– around 200 degrees. Let it cool to at least 120 degrees, but you can go as low as room temperature. Then, warm your oils so that they are within 10 degrees of your lye water solution, at least 120 degrees but you can go down to room temperature just as long as they are both the lye water and oils are within 10 degrees of each other. (For example, if the lye solution is 115 degrees, oils can be 105-125 degrees.) You can put your lye solution in an ice bath (as I demonstrate in the video) to make it cool down quicker. Otherwise, it will take around 30- 45 minutes to cool down.
When your lye water and oils are at the right temperature, then slowly pour the lye water solution into the oils. Stir just briefly to mix. Then, using your hand blender, blend until it traces, about 2-5 minutes. Trace is when you lift the blender out and you see dots where the soap had dripped from the blender and it stays on top for a second or two before it blends back in. After your lye and oils come to trace, add your essential oil if desired. Stir until mixed and then pour into your mold.
Move your soap into an area that is safe from kids and pets. Then cover it with a towel. If you think your towel will fall into the soap, you can put a box or shoebox on top of it first and then put the towel over it all. Then let it sit for 24 hours. After that, you can remove the soap from your mold and cut it with a big knife.
After you have cut the soap, let it cure for 4-6 weeks and you will have homemade lye soap!
You can watch how I made this soap from beginning to end in our video to give yourself an idea of just how easy it really is to make homemade lye soap.
All the information you need to learn How to Make Homemade Soap for Beginners is in my E-course. We have 3 e-books and videos to walk you step by step through the process of making homemade soap.
You can also check out my How to Make Soap Youtube Channel!
You can find more homemade soap recipes like my olive oil soap recipe here!
Here are some of my most recent homemade soaps:
This homemade soap is my “Rocky Mountain” lye soap. It’s inspired by the mountain beauty here in Colorado. This is a pretty advanced lye soap to make. You have to wait for each layer to set up before putting the next layer on and then you have to carefully pile the soap in the middle to make the mountain. Then you put a different color on the sides to hold up your mountain. The little bears on top are made of melt and pour soap poured into a bear silicone mold.
This my “Just Cherry” homemade soap. I made it with a soap swirl. I poured in the white and red lye soap and then gently stirred it with a spoon. I let the soap set up some before piping on the top and putting an embed on top made of melt and pour soap.
This is another one of my homemade mountain soaps. This was actually a mistake. I turned the mold the wrong way and so it didn’t make the mountain like I thought it would. So we will just call it a The Grassy Foothills! LOL This is another pretty advanced homemade soap to make so I wouldn’t try it on your first try but it’s fun to do after you get how to make lye soap down.
This homemade soap is my quilt soap. I had several pieces of colored lye soap leftover that I cut into pieces. Then I put the pink layers on the bottom and mixed the embeds into the white and poured it on top after the bottom layer of lye soap had set. The put some pink on top and mixed it in for pretty glittery top.
This was one of the first lye soaps that I did piping on and I LOVED how it turned out! I thought that I had messed it up but then when I cut it, it turned out to just be beautiful! This just goes to prove that even if you think your homemade soap has failed, don’t give up! It just might turn out!
There were the first homemade soaps I put on my original Etsy store. I just love using all the different colors and scents to make homemade lye soap. It’s a fun hobby and the best part is you can use it and not have to worry about your great great grandkids wondering what they are gong to do with it.
Please note some of the links in this post are affiliate links and we use them to help support this site so we can then pay our bills and bring you more cool stuff!!! Thanks for supporting us! :-)
I have noticed a misprint in your commentary which you may want to correct. Where you mention about the lye water and oils being the same temperature or no greater than 10 degrees different, the temperature range you give should be 105 degrees to 125 degrees, not 95-125 degrees.
Thanks! I fixed it.
Also, I forgot. When you balance the scale so it only weighs out the ingredients and not the container or paper or whatever you are using to hold the ingredient, that is called “tare” pronounced as in tear those pieces of paper up into smaller pieces.
Is there a particular reason to cover with a towel ?
Yes it helps make the colors brighter by keeping it warm for a while.
If lye is a drain cleaner how is good for your skin and does it lather up like soap , I’m really interested in trying to make it thanks I love your blogs
Stephanie, soap has always been lye soap, made with lye, since they first started making soap. Not just homemade soap, but even the soap that you buy at the store is made with lye, but once the soap is made, the lye is converted in a chemical reaction into soap. So using homemade soap is not like putting drain cleaner on your skin, which you would NOT want to do…
Regular non homemade soap that lathers has lye in it too. THis soap does lather, but it isn’t the lye that does the lathering really. When you mix lye with oil in a homemade soap recipe, a chemical reaction happens that changes the ingredients into soap – it is called saponification. This reaction causes the lye to totally disappear. Bottom line is you can’t have soap without having used lye. Even the soaps that people sometimes make with glycerin and say they don’t use lye isn’t true because the glycerin they are using is made with lye.
Every soap you have ever used has lye. Also, people think it is the lather that is what makes a soap good and a good cleaner and that is totally false. Lather has nothing at all to do with how clean we can get from a soap. As a matter of fact some soap makers actually add extra ingredients to make their homemade soap lather more because they know that psychologically people believe that even if it isn’t true so that way the can get you to buy their soap.
That is why the baking soda I use to wash my hair with gets it perfectly clean even though there are not any suds. Soap made years and years ago had very little if any sudsing. Suds are a new thing that we have fallen in love with in the past century or so because soap marketers have convinces people since you can see something happening, you are getting cleaner, but it’s not true.
Hi there! I am unsure if it is safe to use the same containers and utensils for making soap and food. Do you reuse your soap utensils and containers for preparing your meals?? Or should separate containers be used???
Cynthia, if you think about it, you use soap to wash your dishes. Homemade soap is just soap so it is probably safer that using something else. There are no germs or anything on the dishes after making the lye soap and the dishes are really clean.
You might mention that using vinegar on a lye burn will neutralize the chemical reaction.
Tawra:
I have heard somewhere that one can make lye by using wood ashes (even though I don’t know anything about soap making). Have you ever tried it?
No Becky we haven’t but Tawra knows how to do it. They did use to make lye by using wood ashes but it is a messy process and time consuming. Now this next part of the comment I don’t mean for you but I get ask things similar to this all the time so thought I would comment here. I know we often love to do things the old fashion way but we sometimes need to just be grateful that we can do things like go buy lye at the store. There is a reason most of use don’t go to the nearest river and do our laundry by beating them on the rocks and that is because it is a lot of hard work. Even though I have had to wash clothes by hand before I am so glad to have a wash machine and beating them on a rock doesn’t do any better if as good as a job as washing them in a machine. Our grandmothers were wise women. The moment something was invented to make their lives easier they were all over it.
I am very interested in making homemade soap, and I have a source of free lard, so this is the first recipe I will try! I am curious, do you use this soap for anything besides bathing and hand washing? Could you use it for washing dishes or doing laundry? Thanks!
Tawra does grate up some of her soaps and uses them for laundry and she loves cleaning out her bowls when she makes soap and rubs it on her glass top stove to clean it. You could use it on dishes but sometimes it can be a little slippery with all of the oils in it. It really depends on what kind you make. I say try it for both and see what you think. It is just soap and really can’t hurt anything.
This soap is the best for removing all kinds of stains even blood
I use my soap shavings that are leftover as dish soap in a handmade dish sack. And I also blend leftover shavings and add it to borax and washing soda for my laundry soap. I haven’t bought fish or laundry detergent in a year or so. It’s amazing!
(NERD ALERT..LOL)Using wood ashes to create lye is an age old tradition. You can possibly do this at home, however a problem presents itself. Consistency of the lye solution. Each time you make lye solution, you are guessing at the concentration of ash lye in the water when you are done. This is a problem for soap recipes that have very careful measurement. For example; a soap recipe with only 3% superfat may never get all the lye processed/cured out if it is too concentrated. So to sum up, you never know if the wood-ash lye is stronger than the last batch you used and that can potentially wreak havoc with modern recipes, leaving extra lye in the soap and causing it be very harsh. On the other hand if it too weak, you may end up with soft bars that don’t lather well due to extra unprocessed oils.
Thanks for this. This is so true and it applies not only in soap making but in cooking too. We often think that doing every thing from scratch they way they use to is cheaper and better for us when that is not always the case.
Tawara,
I have read this recipe and found it very interesting to make. However, being new at this (soap making), I have always been told to run it thru a “soap cal”. I see you have the ingredients but I don’t see where you have what size mold it is that you are using. Could you kindly let me know the size of the mold you are using.
Thank you so much for this recipe, I can’t wait to try it.
Lisa
As it says in the recipe, it’s for a 1 1/2 pound batch of soap. So that is the size of mold you would use.
I love your soap’s I watch you all the time keep up the great people are loving the saop I make to I would give them a bar and 9h they love it Thank You so much
I loved the video!! Can I use the soap after the 24 hour period or do I need to wait 4-6 weeks?
No you need to let it cure for 4-6 weeks
I have used it 2 weeks after making it
Hi!
I am a costumed interpreter at a historic home and am trying to learn to make soap the old-fashioned way. I went to a different historic site and trained with the soap maker there, but they use commercial lye. I can’t do that at my site. It has to be true to 1816.
I tried my first batch yesterday. I made my own lye with ashes and distilled water (I did cheat on that) and boiled it down until an egg floated, and I could see the top of it in the lye. A couple of the recipes I saw on youtube did not show the need to add water to the lye made from wood ash, so I didn’t add any more water. The recipe I followed used 2 cups lard and 3/4 cups lye water. The temperature of both liquids felt close. Again, doing it the old fashioned way, I did not use a thermometer.
I poured the lye into the melted lard, and it turned white right away. I stirred it by hand in my cast iron pot for about 45 minutes until I got trace. It was about the thickness of gravy when I poured it into the mold. It has been sitting for about 12 hours and is now a little harder than pudding.
I’m wondering if you think I have done something wrong. Any suggestions on how to make truly old fashioned lye soap?
Thanks for any help and suggestions!
Sharron
I would just leave it and let it set and see if it hardens. Next time I would do hot process and not cold process. You can do it over an outdoor fire in a big kettle. No aluminum.
The problem is there’s a reason people use premade lye now…they are sure of the lye content and that it will work. In the old days they basically just guessed and until you had made soap many times you never knew for sure if it was going to work. It’s probably going to have to be just a process of trial and error. Sorry I’m not more help.
Also you could hot process the soap you’ve already made and see if it will work.
Hi Tawra,
can one use a 48% Industrial lye ? and if so, how will it change the recipe ?
Do I just use 6.44 oz ?
What lard is used ?
Sorry, I have never made soap before but would really like to try
Thank you
Leanne I asked Tawra and she said she had no idea whether you can or not. Sorry we couldn’t help. If you need other help though you might check out Tawra’s youtube channel on HowtoMakeSoap and that might help you if you need more help on beginning soap making. Hope this helps.
I made soap several years ago, this sounds a Lot L like the one I used. I remember using olive like pumace? Any idea on how much? Or what the recipe would include using this mami g the soap?
I don’t use pumace but I would guess a couple of Tablespoons depending on the batch size.
Tawra,
Hi, I have watched all your youtube videos and I was wondering if you every tried the Bramble Berry Quick Mixes to make hot process soap?
Also, how much coconut milk and yogurt do you use in a 3 lbs of oil and how much fragrance oil do you use?
Thank you,
Sincerely,
Robynn
I haven’t used their mixes because it is cheaper to mix them myself.
What do you use to add color? I don’t want to turn anyone red or purple
Go to a craft store, on line or sometimes Walmart has special colors you can use for soaps. Just type in colors for homemade soap
I have made lye soap for years but when my daughter tried to make it, she said it didn’t set up. I live 3 hours away and can’t see it. Have you any suggestions on this?It’s been 24 hours since she poured the batch.
It is hard without seeing it Lynne and knowing more what she did but here are a couple of things that could have happened. Sometimes if the right amount of lye is not used (too little) then that could cause it not to set up. Another thing too is not using enough “hard” or more solid oils. You need to be very careful in following a recipe for it and getting exact measurements.