The Goatie Milk Soap Story

Have been wanting to post for sometime now about how Farmgirl started to make goats milk soap. Friends of ours down the road knew that we had goats. They had two older Nubian does that were pets and needed to downsize. One day, Beth asked me if I thought I would notice if she "threw" two goats into the pasture and would I notice??? Well I think I probally would since my goats were angoras and her goats didn't look a thing like mine...LOL

Hence I soon acquired in early summer two very demanding girls,
Oreo and Chloe! Since we are a breeding farm we knew that we would have to give them a job! Well after searching and finally finding, Fred, on Craigs List the girls were bred with the hopes that I would be able to figure out how to milk them!

February came and the girls both had sets of twins, one doe and three bucklings. Left the babies with their Mommas and after about a month started to milk them. After much spilled and kicked over milk the girls and I got into a routine twice a day. Well boy did I have milk...we had milk coming out of our ears! We drank it, we cooked with it and I made soap with it. The milk that I couldn't use right away we froze in 1/2 gallons bags.

After much trial and error...burned and boiled over messes, I finally started making some awesome soap! I ordered scents that I liked and started out small by selling some at a local festival. I sold the soap like gangbusters and then put some in the shop on etsy. It is a nice change from the fiber side of my farm buisness and it makes me feel good about producing another product from something I raise here on the farm!

Their are alot of steps that you must follow exactly...just like cooking and the most important part is saftey as the sodium hydroxide used is very caustic when mixing. It becomes noncaustic after the soap has cured for 6 weeks or so.

I wear long sleeved shirts, goggles and gloves...please don't stop by while I am making soap...you would be very afraid!

You must work very quickly and have all of your ingredients ready ahead of time.

The pots and utensils I use for making soap are used only for soap and labeled as such!

Here are pictures of the soap in the molds. They must cure in the molds for 24 hours and then they are released and cut by hand into individual bars.

PS they shrink so cut them big...:)

One thing that I do want to change is to add more scent to some of the recipes and to convert to all essential oils. Even though the essential oils are more expensive...I think it will be worth it in the long run! What do you think?