You made what?! (An unposted adventure reborn)

So I was looking through my blog history today (sorry I haven't been keeping up, there is too much crazy and I'd never get anything done!) and I found this gem from 2015 that I started and never posted.  It details how I started making soap. Enjoy!

It all started with the decision to buy a cow. What? Isn't that how all new hobbies start? With the decision to buy a large ruminant animal? Well, in our house, that's how things roll. "Lonnie" and I, after getting our gigantic freezer moved to Wichita from the Colorado pot house, felt that our money would best be used by buying a nice grassfed cow and having it butchered, thus providing us with a years worth of meat. As part of the discussion was "Lonnie's" question, "Hey, should we get any of the fat, they are just going to throw it away?" Now, I hate waste and I knew that there are things that could be made with beef fat. So I started researching and sure enough, both soap and candles can be made with tallow, or rendered beef fat. A new obsession was born!!! We got our dead cow parts in May, with about 40 pounds of frozen beef fat. It took me an additional 3 months of procrastinating before I tackled that rendering job. Rendering is simply melting the fat, straining out the yuck and chunks, then removing the pure white tallow. However, cutting up 20 pounds (I started with half) of frozen beef fat is hard (I got blisters), smelly (I could never be a butcher), and not something I will repeat in the month of July. Now, I started the boiling part with only about 5 pounds. Just a small amount to practice the process. I put the pot on the stove, loaded it with fat and water, and waited. I felt like a true prairie pioneer, using all my resources and saving the planet one dead cow at a time. 

Now, if you've never smelled boiling cow fat you are truly one of the fortunate. I didn't notice the smell at first, being as I was standing there watching it. "Lonnie" came in from outside and was like, "where are you hiding the body? It smells like a slaughterhouse in here!" Sure enough, I walked out and came back in and almost puked. Immediately I opened windows, turned on the fans and tried desperately to air out the kitchen. The only smell worse than boiling fat is...well, I'm sure there are some hospital smells that are bad but right now I can't think of anything worse than what my stovetop was producing. I did not stop boiling though, we were almost finished and I was going to see this through dang it! Bottomline, I finished that pot, got beautiful tallow the next day, and thankfully there was no effects on the house. When I rendered the rest of that 20 pounds, I used the turkey fryer outside! 

So then it took me another 3 months of procrastinating and research to get down to the nitty gritty of soap making. It can get off the hook crazy with colors, designs, smells, OMG! There is the lye, and weights, thermometers, it was just too much to absorb. So I decided to just find a simple recipe, try that a whole bunch, and if it all went bad then at least making candles was easy (melt tallow, add scent, pour into container with wick, done). Once I had all my ingredients and had done a few dry runs (like a surgeon preparing for an open heart procedure), I donned my evil scientist goggles and gloves and went at it. I really felt like Dr. Frankenstein pouring over my potions and the stove. But, my preparation paid off and I made a great batch of lavender soap! I followed that up with some color experiments (yellow and blue make green, not blue, duh) and some smell adventures (vanilla smells like play-doh, yuck!). But all in all, for me, this little adventure was a success and did not involve any emergency rooms, fire departments, or further damage to the house. It was so boring I almost didn't blog it for you all.