Soapmaking business born from necessity
Published: Monday, July 12, 2010 at 3:30 a.m.
Last Modified: Sunday, July 11, 2010 at 10:57 p.m.
ANNISTON | The babe in the stroller eyed the colorful cake held down to her. It looked so scrumptious, she opened her mouth as if to nibble on it.
Not so fast, kid. You don’t eat it. You get clean with it.
But it sure smelled good enough to eat, because when Sandra McLeroy goes off to work as a soap maker, the natural fragrances she uses stimulate the senses of young and old alike.
“Is that candy?” an older gentleman asked the Heflin woman when he paused at her shaded booth at the Zinn Park Farmer’s Market in Anniston on a recent Saturday.
A nurse by profession, as is her husband, McLeroy obviously appreciates the value of cleanliness.
But when their daughter developed eczema, a skin condition, she put her interest in handicrafts to work by learning how to make soap.
Natural soap, she explained, lacks the detergent of commercially made soap, and thus is more healthful for skin.
McLeroy makes the product in 8-pound batches in her kitchen, using lye she buys online in crystalline form because grocery stores don’t sell it anymore. First, she carefully mixes water with lye. Heat is generated in the process, and then, separately, mixes the natural oils that give the soap its mild quality. These include vegetable oils, olive oil and sweet almond oil.
“You’ve got your lye and water mixed in one pot, and oils mixed in another pot,” she said, explaining that the chemical reaction between lye and oil, at the right temperature, makes soap. (It’s an old process, certainly known in American pioneer days, when the lye came from the ashes of wood fires.)
“If you use the right amount of each thing, the lye goes away,” she said.
After she combines all of the above, the ingredients begin to harden, or “saponify.” At that point, McLeroy mixes in the oils that make natural soap smell so delicious. They’re of two types: Essential oils consist of the “juice” of a plant itself, such as rosemary or spearmint, while fragrant oils are manufactured, and are used to create, for example, sandalwood or mango aromas.
Colors are also naturally derived. Mica powder creates blue, oak moss creates a mottled grayish green and honey oatmeal assumes a dark golden hue.
The mixture hardens completely in an insulated 16-inch-square pine box, 4 inches high, that’s been lined with freezer paper. After about 48 hours, the resulting substance can be cut into squares of soap.
“Three big cuts and a bunch of little cuts,” she said, divide the soap into shapes that she sets aside on wire racks to cure for six weeks.
“It gets milder the longer it sits,” she said. “If you tried to use it right after (it hardens), it might have lye and oil that haven’t done their thing yet.”
Seeing the finished product is its own reward, McLeroy said.
“When you cut it up and see the different colors and patterns it’s created, that’s my favorite part.”
McLeroy can generate a dozen 8-pound boxes in about a week. Her busy season is summer — the season of muggy heat that makes soap most desirable, as well as the season of craft sales where she presents her wares.
The first public presentation of her work was at OxfordFest three years ago, she said. Before that, she made soap for family and friends.
“I’m not in it to make a living or make money. It’s like a hobby right now,” she said.
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