Sunny Calendula Soap

Our last soaping session was in late April, right before the gardening season really took off. Dave grew some Calendula just for us to use in lotions and soap.

It’s not a real impressive plant.

But the blooms are beautiful.

Last year we had to fight the deer for the flowers, but we still had enough to infuse to make this new soap, Sunny Calendula. This uses Calendula infused almond oil. See this post for infusing directions.

This is one of the few soaps where we didn’t include Palm oil.

Please refer to the cold process instructions here.

After taking those pictures at the beginning of the post of our calendula, I harvested those beautiful flowers to dry.

We’ve really had a great harvest this year of almost everything we grow including these pretty flowers.

As far as the soap, it is still a hard bar even though we aren’t using palm. We were concerned since palm is such a hard oil. But it’s nice and hard and real bubbly.

But WAIT! You say you don’t have any calendula or don’t really like the essential oils we’ve chosen – no problem! With any of our soaps, you can tweak this basic recipe adding your own favorite essential or fragrance oils. If you wanted this to be a scrubby hand bar you could add pumice, oats, coffee grounds or lavender.

Since we like this bar so well we’ll be making more, but tweaking with those different changes. That’s what is fun about soap making. Once you find that basic bar recipe you like, it can be taken into all different directions.