We use pure beeswax in our All Natural Goat Milk Soap because it gives a solidness that prolongs the life of the bar.

Sodium hydroxide is used to trigger the saponification of the ingredients. We like to say that we simply put the right ingredients together and then let them make the soap!  Mom mixes the sodium hydroxide with distilled water and goat’s milk.  At the same time we melt and mix a special blend of oils and beeswax together.  We use olive oil, palm oil, vegetable oil, vitamin E oil, and coconut oils to insure that our soap is full of good things as well as pleasant to use.   Olive oil moisturizes while providing protection against the harsh climate your skin must face every day.   Vitamin E is an antioxidant and natural preservative; we use coconut oil to create firm bars that really give you a great lather.

Everything needs to be cooled before anything can be mixed together and this requires a lot of stirring!!

Here you see us mixing all of the ingredients together…..

While Mom is busy mixing the oils, wax and sodium hydroxide , Pamela is going to add the essential oil.  We add these all natural, scented oils at the end to ensure that everything has been mixed well before hand.

These are our unique soap molds They are responsible for the delightful shapes we are able to offer to our customers.  Our most popular designs are the dogs, goats and roosters!

The molds laying out on the table, ready to be filled……

Here, Nathan is carefully pouring the liquid soap into measuring cups so that we may then carefully pour it into the molds.  Sometimes, no matter how careful we are, we end up pouring too much soap into the molds and then – our molds overfloweth.

Look at how carefully Pamela and Mom are filling the molds!!  We are thankful for their steady hands.

After the molds are completely filled, we place them on a table in our ’soap room’.  We use freezer paper between the layers and then cover the whole lot of them with an old comforter.  The heavy blanket keeps the heat in while the soap begins the process of curing.

Emily is our appointed record keeper and she reported that we produced 371 bars of soap that day! What a lot of work, but we had a very good time and now our inventory is on its way to being restocked.  According to Nathan’s records, we are half way to being completely stocked.  We are looking forward to another soap making day in the near future.

We appreciate hearing from you. Good-bye for now,

The Moores

— We also wanted to mention our new scent, Orange.  It is now able to be ordered through the website.  Try a bar today!

Some soap molds stacked to dry.

With over two hundred soap molds in my stock, it can be a lengthy process to clean all of them. In fact, many facets of the soapmaking process are made more complicated by the use of these detailed soap molds. It takes longer to set out all the molds for the pouring process of the soapmaking. It takes longer, and is trickier, to pour the soap into the molds, since each individual soap mold cavity must be carefully filled.

Pouring Soap

This limits the amount of soap I can make at one time, since it is necessary for me to be able to get all the goat milk soap poured into the molds before the soap becomes too thick. The molds take up a singnificant amount of storage place. They are relativiely expensive to invest in. With these factors in mind, most soapmakers deem it too much work to produce soap for sale using these molds. I, however, think that the beautiful goat milk soap resulting from these molds is well worth the extra work! I can get a bar of plain old square, retangular, round, or oval soap anyday — maybe even natural soap. But how often can I find an all-natural, goat milk soap bar that is as beautiful to look at as it is nourishing to use? I want to be able to offer such a product to my customers, even it if means a bit more work and time for me, and these molds are the perfect tool to help me do that.

Molds such as this one produce the beautiful, detailed designs of Garland Goat Soap of Maine!

By the way, do you have a particular design you’d like to see in our goat milk soaps? Please offer your suggestions…I’m delighted to hear what you’d like so that I may be able to suppply it for you!

To superfat soap is to leave unsaponified oils in the final bars for the mildest soap. Unsaponified oils do not form compounds with the other soapmaking components but, instead, remain in their original form in the bar as emollient ingredients.

The percentage of sodium hydroxide in a soap formula is carefully calculated according to the degree of saponification desired. (Remember, saponification is the process whereby the oil molecules and sodium hydroxides molecules mix to form the new substance — soap.) When enough sodium hydroxide is used to supply all of the fatty acids with sodium hydroxide mates, the soap is considered fully saponified. No discount is taken from the percentage of sodium hydroxide required for complete saponification. This fully saponified soap does not contain excess oils. By using less sodium hydroxide than is required for a complete saponification, however, fat and oil molecules run out of lye mates. The excess oil remains in the final bar of soap as a soothing moisturizer. This milder soap is called a superfatted soap — a soap provided with excess fat and oil to make it more moisturizing.

Nearly all bath soaps clean, but the degree of saponification determines how gently or how harshly they do their jobs. An excess of sodium hydroxide not only can strip the skin of dirt and excess oils, but it can take away important natural oils as well. People with dry skin are especially affected by the strip-clean. When emollient fats and oils are added to soap as superfatting ingredients, they lay a hydrophobic film on the skin’s surface that softens the skin by holding in internal moisture.

So by superfatting our goat milk soap, we are providing our skin with a milder, gentler, and more moisturizing skin-care experience!

In cold process soapmaking, the method I use to make our goat milk soap bars, an acid and a base must be combined to produce soap. It is the reaction that occurs between the acid and base which forms soap. The acid is the oil, whether a neutral oil or a pure fatty acid. The base must be the sodium hydroxide, for fats and oils cannot be converted into soap without it. As the sodium hydroxide and the oils are combined together, the process of saponification occurs as the triglycerides of the oils break down into fatty acids  that react with the sodium ions of the base lye solution to create a whole new product – SOAP!

The proportion of sodium hydroxide to oils in a soap recipe affects how they react…and we use a discounted proportion of sodium hydroxide in order to produce a “superfatted” bar of soap – an extra mild, moisturizing soap. I will share more on what this means in the next blog post. For now, though, you can understand how our soap is made with sodium hydroxide yet contains no chemicals and is very mild and gentle!

The gentle cleansing and moisturizing properties of the oils used in Garland Goat Soaps make them ideal for baby's tender skin.

Palm oil is another important oil for use in a natural bar soap. A gentle cleanser and moisturizer, palm oil contributes to lasting hardness in a bar of soap. Unlike coconut oil, however, it will not cause the bar of soap to become brittle, so when these two types of oils are combined together, the resulting soap lasts a long time without becoming brittle and cracked. Palm Oil is rich in palmitic acid, vitamin E, vitamin K and magnesium and is considered to be a natural source of anti-oxidant.

Last but not least, Vitamin E oil completes the well-rounded selection of oils in Garland Goat Soap of Maine’s base soap recipes. Vitamin E oil is extremely emollient, and deeply moisturizing. Because of it’s make up, it does not saponify in the soapmaking process (in other words, it does not react with sodium hydroxide to make soap, but rather remains in it’s pure form as an unsaponified oil) and acts as a natural preservative in the soap.

Is your skin needing a lift? A bar of natural soap chock full of skin-nurishing oils, coupled with the special luxeries of goat milk, will give your skin just what it needs! Check out your options here.