Lye Making - Attempt the Second

Things are slowly starting to move again. December and me, we're not getting along very well this year.

But as a silver lining, one of my contacts finally came through, and I've gotten access to a local orchards apple wood cuttings. So far I've collected two car boots and one back seats worth of wood, and discovered that green wood really is difficult to get burning. Given that one of my concerns regarding the last lye attempt was that the wood was too old and dry, I wanted to try and burn this lot at maximum sap. Incidentally, the minimum drying time is approximately 2 days in the boot of the car during "I though this was winter" temperatures, followed by 2 days indoors in a heated home. And even at that the wood was still fighting with me somewhat, and the fire tried going out twice.

But now the grate is cooling, and all the wood has successfully been reduced to fine, whiteish ash. I'll leave it there three days, then scoop it into a bucket to keep. I'm due a few more loads of wood in January when the orchard pruning restarts, and I want to wait until I have as large an amout as possible so I know how many leaching attempts I'll be able to make.

Soap Making - Rendering the Fat

Making the lye, step II is going to be some time happening on this blog. I tried to filter my batch and again, no lye. The egg sank and when I tried using a hydrometer to test the specific density, the density was the same as water. To add salt to the wound, there appeared to be maggots living in my supposedly caustic solution quite happily, so lye it very much wasn't. I chucked it out and I think I've identified where I went wrong on this attempt, and it's one of three options:

• I misidentified the wood and you simply can't leach lye that isn't there. 
• I had too little ash to too much water, so it would have been lye, if I'd evaporated off some of the water,
• or I had lye, but didn't filter it soon enough, so it exhausted itself on the straw in the bucket 

In the mean time, I've been working on the oils I'll be using for this project. Thanks to a local butcher, I've gotten my hands on pig and cow fat which I'm wet rendering down into a usable fat for soap making. Wet rendering involves adding the fat to hot water and summering away, periodically skimming the fat from the surface of the water. This method gives a lighter, more deordorised form of fat, and leaves my kitchen smelling faintly of bacon. The resulting lard is beautifully silky, and as previous soap making I've done has exclusively been vegetarian in ingredients, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how well it turns out as a soap. 

The beef gave up it's fat more readily, giving a harder, lightly yellow coloured fat. It's easy to see how this gives a harder soap. 

Now I just need to get my hands on the commercial potassium hydroxide pellets a friend secured for me, and I'll be able to start soap making! I have a total of 8 bars planned: pure lard, pure tallow, tallow & lard comabined and olive oil - each of these combinations I'll do once with potassium hydroxide (KOH) and once with the more modern sodium hydroxide (NaOH) for comparison. 

I'm also tempted to put some of the lard to use in enfleurage - a technique for, well, harvesting the perfume for delicate blooms while the Whiskey Mac rose is still blooming in the back garden. And if that's successful, it'll make a most delightful soap.

Lyer, lyer

This weekend, I attempted to process my first batch of lye.

Lye is a caustic substance and will burn skin if it comes into contact with it, so make sure you take all safety precautions if you decide to try this yourself. 

With the lye bucket raised up, I placed a second bucket underneath to catch the solution. There was a minor problem with this set up, which was that I didn't account for the force of the water coming out from the first bucket, and the very first parts of my solution ended up on the ground. It was at this point I was glad I had taken the proper precautions and it was my latex gloves that got splashed, not my hands.

And the solution that resulted? Well, the colour was about right. But did I have lye?

Another thing to note about lye is that due to possible contamination, you need to use dedicated equipment. That is, once you start using certain equipment for lye, you need to put it to one side and not use it for any other purpose.

So to test if I had lye, I used the old method of testing the density* of the solution. This involved floating an egg or small potato in the solution, and unlike in water where a fresh egg would sink, the item should float with just a small portion floating above the surface. I took a jug full of my solution, and gentled lowered an egg into the liquid.

It sank.

It just sank. Straight to the bottom. It did not even have the courtesy to hesitate or descend slowly to the bottom of the jug, as if something was supporting it. Oh no. Result, I do not have lye yet.

Thankfully, I'd already secured and fired more hardwood, so I added these ashes to the bucket and poured my first leaching back over them. And this time I was rewarded with the slight fizz I've read comes with the successful leaching of lye from ashes. I topped up the bucket with about another pint, to allow for what I'd lost initially, so now I just have to wait another week, and keep my fingers crossed.



*density may not be the correct term. I can't think which one would be. My old science teachers would be ashamed of me.

Soap! - Making the Lye, Part I

The ashes have cooled, and I've assembled the rest of my materials, so it's time to make some lye!

For this process, it's very important to have all of the materials to hand before you start, so here's what you need and the way you'll be using them:

Materials:
Bucket or waterproof barrel - the size depends on how much lye you intend to process. For me, this will be on the smaller scale.
Cork or tap
Gravel
Straw - I used pet bedding
Hardwood - burnt to ashes
Soft water - I used collected rainwater from the garden's water barrel.

And here's how to make the lye:

As I mentioned in my last post, I had burnt my birch wood into ash and had left it to cool in the grate. Next I obtained a bucket, I'm using a small 3 gallon size, and I drilled a hole near the base to fit a cork snuggly. Just to be sure of the fit, I half filled the bucket with water but no drips resulted.

This method is just one that can be used. A tap can also be fitted at the bucket base, or multiple holes drilled in the base. This would mean a second bucket is needed and the water would run through straight away. The disadvantage with this is that multiple leachings are needed to extract the lye. The system I want is to be able to leave the ashes soaking for a couple of days before I extract the liquid.


Next, I added gravel to a depth of about two inches in the bucket. On top of this, I added straw to another two inches. Well, it was two inches when I squished it down, but being straw, it didn't want to stay squished. The gravel and straw acts as a filter after the ashes have been soaked, and prevent it from coming out with the water. Due to the caustic nature of the lye, the straw will likely have to be changed out on each batch.





Next, I filled the bucket with water enough to completely submerge the straw, when it wasn't floating. This brought the water level up to the bucket's two gallon mark.

And lastly, the ash. I had more ash that I'd realised from my first lot of birch wood, and I aggitated the surface slightly to make sure it was all moistened. For good measure, I topped up the water some more too, to the 10 litre mark.




All that done, I've left the bucket in the shed to do its thing, covered over with a plastic bag to prevent anything from falling in that doesn't belong there.

In Making the Lye, Part II, I'll cover the liquid extract, testing and preparation for use parts of the lye making process.

Soap!

It's been another week post-larp, meaing that the crafting has been on the light side again. However, I did get a couple of small pieces done.

Firstly, a crochet snood, "Starburst Snood" by Maddalena Casci, available on ravelry. This was made for a friend in exchange for a new feasting plate she'd given me.










Secondly, with summer finally here, that means driving without collars. And driving without collars means the seatbelt goes back to attemting to saw off my neck by slow friction.

Cue the first chunky stash yarn to hand (which nicely matches the colour of my little red polo), a large crochet hook and job’s a good ‘un.

 And then, a breakthrough!

I was monstering a charity larp on saturday, which took place in the very beautiful Indian Sculpture Park in the Wicklow Mountains. The site contains a mini maze, a pathway through woodland which guides you to contemplation of Buddist principales and carved statues. And during the wandering, I had a curious. A quick trip to the interwebs confirmed it. I was surrounded by a birch wood and birch is indeed a hardwood! A quick side trip to ask permission of the site owner, and my car boot was rapidly filled with a selection of fallen branches.

Still with me? Here's the deal. I want to make soap. It is very easy to get hold of the ingredients I need to make soap according to the modern method, but since rejoining the SCA, I think making soap where I start by making my own lye, would make a fabulous project. But to do that, I first need the ashes from a hardwood. I had been trying to get my hands on applewood, which is supposed to produce a very white soap, but alas, that plan has fallen through for the moment.

Ashes from hardwoods, such as birch, apple, oak or cherry to name a few, contain a substance commonly known as potash, which is also know as potassium hydroxide, an alkali that can be mixed with fats or oils to produce soap. Typically, potassium hydroxide produces a softer soap, so to make a hard bar, animal fat or a combination of olive oil and salt will need to be used.

The birch I brought away with me has already been burned down and will remain sitting in the grate for the next two days to ensure it's cold. Soft water I already have access to thank to the rain barrel outside, so I'm almost ready to begin!