Make lye at home.

  Make lye at home for your soap making needs.

Make lye at home is perfect for making homemade liquid soap and shampoo. It isn't difficult, although if you have access to commercial lye, you may prefer to use that instead. This is because commercial lye will give you consistency in your lye soap recipes. The problem with making lye from wood ash, although it is a simple process, the end result can be that your lye water is either too strong, or too weak. Either way, it will spoil your batch of homemade soap. Having said that, none of our ancestors had access to commercial lye and they made soap just fine. We will also give you a couple of tests to do that will take a lot of the guess work out of the process, making sure that your lye is of the right strength.

MAKE LYE: INGREDIENTS

The ingredients for making lye are wood ash and water. Preferably rain water, as it is soft, although tap water will work just as well. The ash should come from hardwoods as soft woods are too resinous to mix with fat. Hickory, sugar maple, ash, beech and buckeye wood are the best producers of lye.

MAKE LYE: EQUIPMENT

Traditionally, to make lye, people used wooden buckets or casks lined with straw and small rocks. Now, not everyone has access to these things, so I am going to show you how you can make lye just as easily in an old nappy bucket or something similar.

Take your old plastic nappy bucket and drill a neat round hole, about an inch off the bottom on one side of the bucket. It shouldn't be very big, about the diameter of a small iron nail - about 1/8th of an inch. Make sure that the size of the hole is the same size of the nail that you will use to stop up the hole when needed.

MAKE LYE: THE PROCESS

Using cold wood ash, take a spade and carefully place the ash into the stopped-up bucket. Make sure that what you are placing in the bucket is the fine, white ash, as opposed to any charcoal bits. This you don't need. Make sure that the ash is well compacted in the bucket.

Boil water half of the capacity of the bucket and pour gently over the ashes. As soon as the water makes contact with the ash it will start hissing and bubbling. This is perfectly normal. You may find at this stage that the water is just sitting on top of the ash, without it appearing to do anything. Just leave it, without disturbing it, and come back later to see when you can add the rest of the water.

Once you have used all the water elevate the bucket so that you are able to place a glass or plastic container under the hole that you previously drilled and stopped up with a nail. Place your receiving container under the hole and remove the nail. Do not expect lye water to come out of here. This could take hours, if not days.

Once you have enough lye water use the nail to stop up the hole. Take the lye water to the kitchen and boil carefully. Take care at this stage as the lye is caustic and if it splashes onto your skin and into your eyes it will burn. You will need ot wear gloves and safety glasses at this point. Once you have heated up your lye water take it back to your bucket and carefully pour it back over the ashes in the bucket. This helps strengthen the lye.

Wait for the lye to emerge once again.

MAKE LYE: TESTS FOR STRENGTH:

To make lye and be successful at soap making your lye has to be at the right strength. Now there are 2 ways in which this can be done, both of which indirectly involve chickens. If you live on a farm and keep chickens, then this test is fine for you. If not, then you can use the second test.

Test 1

This is a simple test. Take a chicken feather and place it in the lye. If the feather dissolves, the lye is strong enough and you can use it for your soap. If not, you will have to re-boil the lye water when it emerges and repeat the process until your chicken feathers dissolve.

Test 2

This test involves using a fresh egg in a shell. Take the egg and place it in the cold lye water. If it sinks, your lye is not strong enough and you will have to repeat the process until it does. If the egg floats with just a little of the lye water above it, then the strength is just right. If the egg floats too high, almost on top of the lye water, then the strength is too strong. You can compensate by adding a little bit of fresh water to the lye water and try again.

With the first test, I would still back this up with the "egg floating" test, just to make sure that my lye water was not too strong.

MAKE LYE: THE FINAL PROCESS

When you buy commercial lye it is in the form of crystals. When you make lye at home you will want your lye to be in crystals too. This is very easy to do. Take your lye water and place it in the sun until the water has evaporated. What you are left with are your lye crystals that you can use quite happily in your soap making recipes.

In the end your homemade lye is softer on the skin. It is potassium hydroxide as opposed to sodium hydroxide. When following soap recipes make sure that you use the right type of hydroxide, as although both are lye, they cannot usually be used in place of the other in certain recipes. The potassium hydroxide molecules are larger than the sodium hydroxide molecules. It is this size difference that enables the potassium hydroxide to maintain a liquid state. Potassium hydroxide is normally used to make liquid soaps. However, you can make a hard soap by adding common salt at the end of the boiling process. If you want to add salt to harden your bars of soap, weigh out the water you are going to mix your lye with. Before you add the lye, add ½ tsp. of salt per pound of oil/rendered fat in your recipe. Stir well to make sure that all of the salt is dissolved. Add your lye to the salted water, making your lye solution, and resume your normal soap making procedure. Both types of hydroxide, however, are extremely corrosive and must be handled and stored with care.

Visit our Making Soap page for more information on how to make soap at home. You will also find Soap Recipes for the three main types of soaps; hand-milled soaps where you do not have to use raw lye, cold process and hot process soaps.