Botanical Soap Making

I have told this story before, but I was convinced I was going to blow up the house the first time I made soap. My friend and I looked like we were heading into a radioactive zone with the amount of safety gear we had on - goggles, hats, n95 masks before they were cool, gloves up to our elbows…we were ready. We were scared of the lye - each with childhood stories of its dangers. We cleared the room to mix that first spoon of lye with water…and nothing happened.

Well, not nothing, because the water activated the sodium hydroxide that lye contains and started its magic work of turning the oils in our recipe into soap, but after being so worried about our potential imminent doom, it was all very non-eventful. However, in that kitchen that day, a love of soap making was born.

Over the last few years, we have made thousands of bars of soap. Our passion has always been creating seasonal blends with our own farmed and foraged ingredients. There is something really magical about harvesting plants, infusing them in oils or teas and then making beautiful bars of soap with them. Its a way of preserving their seasonal properties and carrying them with you into the next season.

Our Botanical Soap Making online course is an opportunity to pull together those strands we love so much and share them with a wider audience. This course is 8 weeks of lessons of written and video content. We will take you through the basic soap making and herbal processing techniques and then look at how to apply that in your soap making through a series of deep dives into common herbs, oils and materials used for soap making, including: calendula, nettles, bog myrtle, horsetail, lavender, yarrow and honey. We will also cover how to get a license for selling soap and guidelines on packaging and labelling so you can meet UK guidelines.