MAKING RECIPES #12 Handmade soap with herbal ingredients that exfoliate

Ways to incorporate herb colours, a swirl of bark powder and more in cold process soap making

Soap making with alkanet colouring

In this MAKING RECIPES #12 post on soap making, I describe my experience of making soap with ingredients including medicinal tree bark, discuss the process and equipment, and give a recipe for Violet Willow and Juniper Soap, ideal for gardeners! Making your own soap is a brilliant thing to do. Soap recipes are productive, often making a kilogram or more at a time, enough to last a long time for a single household! The real joy is in being able to make unique and useful soap products for sale. Soap is ideal in the small producer market for body care because it keeps remarkably well, is easy to package and transport, can be made in many attractive combinations, and customers are often keen to purchase handmade items.

Medicinal tree barks and soap

My venture into soapmaking arose because I was considering body and skin care recipes that could incorporate some of the plants growing in our medicinal woodland. I did some training with a local soap supplies provider and adapted a basic recipe to incorporate plant colour and bark ingredients. One recipe, for Violet Willow and Juniper Soap, was designed to produce a gardener's soap with some antiseptic qualities and exfoliant effect for soiled hands. Another recipe, for White Willow and Ginger Soap, was intended to provide exfoliant effects for the face and skin alongside a softer exotic aroma. I found that alkanet and turmeric provided just the right ingredients for violet and honey colours, respectively, and experimented with ways to incorporate the tree bark powders in making exfoliant soap.

MAKING RECIPES # series

This post on packaging herbal preparations is part of the MAKING RECIPES # series. The MAKING RECIPES # series of posts is for paid subscribers and gives my inside story based on growing, harvesting, making, preserving, selling healing remedies and body care products from the medicinal forest garden. As a paid subscriber you can see these posts in full and receive all of this written material prepublication! You will also be supporting me in developing the Medicinal Forest Garden Trust which is much appreciated. And, with a paid subscription, you can join the community chat. Or join with a free subscription as all of my other posts are available free to subscribers.

Adding powdered bark to soap as an exfoliant

Our medicinal woodland was incredibly productive, especially of willow bark, so it seemed a no-brainer to combine bark powder with good quality soap made by the cold process method.