Dandelion Soap

Hello!

So… I’ve been thinking of putting together a bit of a ‘natural botanical’ selection of soaps to offer something a bit different to my ‘normal’ soaps (Do I even have normal?)

I just made an aloe vera soap out of fresh aloe from the garden. (I’ve failed to take a photo of the actual soap – its very plain with some green clay used as the colourant and rosemary essential oil as the fragrance. I am looking forward to trying it out

I will revisit the carrot soap, turmeric, orange (using the dried zest as a scrub) rosemary and some other ideas.

I saw online a ‘how to’ on dandelion soap along with all the blurb on the great things that the humble dandelion can do/or be a benefit for.

I went out into the paddock and took a huge basket… and found an underwhelming amount of dandelions!!
I dried the flowers anyway.

The easier and quicker part was to dehydrate and crush/powder both the leaves and roots

After this much effort I figured I’d need to do the infused oil properly so we stopped on the side of the road after one of our walks and picked a heap more dandelion flowers.
I partially dried those then dumped them into the oil to infuse

They were left for about 2 weeks.

Another hike and another forage session to get more flowers to make dandelion tea (Yah.. this is a process…)

Overnight soaking of the flowers created a brown tea colour, but once mixed into the lye it went a nice yellow

So… finally I was up to the actual soap making part! (No pressure)

I split the batch in two and worked on the bottom layer using the regular oil and lye mix, but adding in French green clay and a couple of spoonful’s of the crushed dried dandelion leaves
A fairly thick mixture so I could make an uneven divide between the two layers

Once in the mould, I sprinkled the first layer with the powdered root in the hope it would show up between layers once cut.
Once it set enough, I started to mix the top layer

I decided to just let the infused oil and the tea do the colouring for me rather than adding in any clays.
I did mix through an apricot kernel scrub

The whole loaf has also been fragranced by lemongrass essential oil, which is just lovely!

Drum roll… agony waiting today to get it out of the mould and see how it went.

I was so pleased with it!
It looks lovely and natural, but not boring!! I like all the little bits of texture and the muted colours, not least the powdered line of the dandelion roots!
I am calling it a success!

Cheers