Karen Danella: Hello, I am Karen Danella with Cedarwood Soaps. Today we are showing you how to make soap. Now, I am going to show you how to mix the oils and warm them up. I have this pre-measured and what I did, I used coconut, palm, olive, sunflower and castor oil and Shea butter and I already pre-measured these, just to make this easy and it depends on your recipe.

Like I said, I am using 64 ounces of oils here, so you can choose whatever oils that you like and all the measurements are going to be different because the oils that you choose react differently to the lye and what you can do, is go online and type in all the oils that you use and you can choose how much of each oil that you would like to use and then you can find a Lye calculator online and it will tell you exactly how much of each to use and what your lye measurements are.

Okay, now I am going to take the oils and warm them in the microwave for about four minutes and I want it to get to the temperature about the same as the lye, between 100 and 120 degrees. A lot of people do use the stove method and that's fine too. But I am going to save some time and just put it in the microwave, until it heats up to about, like I said, a 100 to 120 which will match the lye temperature.

Okay, now we have taken this out of the microwave, I am going to use my thermometer and check the temperature. Okay, very good right there at a 110, that's good. Okay, now I am going to take my lye-water mixture and pour it in slowly, stand back a little bit, set this aside. Now, I am going to take my stick blender and start stirring this until it starts to look like pudding. It will take anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour, but with the stick blender, it's a lot fast, so this might be about five or ten minutes, ten minutes I can most probably say.

Okay, now we can see that this getting a little bit thick and that's the time that we want to put our additives in and by the way I am making Gardener's soap. So, I have a little bit of organic clay here, that I am going to put in and I have some Cornmeal which was already measured out ahead a time, you want to have these ready, dump that in. I am going to stir it a little bit more before I put the essential oils in. You can alternate between turning on your stick blender and stirring it while it's off, so you don't burn it out and now I am going to add, my top note is going to be Sweet Orange Essential Oil and you use a tablespoon for a pound and since I have 4 pounds of soap, I am going to put four of this. I am going to get -- for the top note, the sweet orange. I am going to put two of those in and for my middle note, I am using clove, I am using a Sweet Orange Essential Oil blend as the top note. So, that would be the first thing you smell and the middle note is clove essential oil and it's going to round off with a little bit of nutmeg.

So, we will have a nice smelling soap here, so you can choose whatever essence that you like to put in there and I going to start stirring again. Oh! smells good, I can smell it already. So this is how it should look, when you are ready to pour it into the mold, you can see it's very thick and pudding like.

Okay, so then when we come back I am going to show you how to pour it into the soap mold.