DIY Crockpot Coffee Soap and Body Scrub
I love soap and I love coffee. So I’m thinkin’, why not smash them together? I found a coffee soap recipe that’s made in a crockpot. It looked simple enough, so off I went to grab the few ingredients I didn’t already have at home. I was out of olive oil and coffee, so I quickly snagged those. Last on my list… Lye. I struck out at two grocery stores. The Wal-Mart girl was very disinterested and said she’d “never heaaaarrrrd of lyyyyyye”. Lowe’s directed me to the industrial-sized fertilizer aisle where , shocker, I found no little bottles of lye. This is what I was looking for…
My last stop, before I was going to bag the whole idea, was at the neighborhood hardware store. This extremely polite kid directed me to a shelf right by the checkstand, and there it was, finally! As I’m grabbing bottles and gushing about how excited I was to have finally found it – you guys are great! – oh my gosh, now that I’ve found it, I’m buying a ton of it! – blah, blah, blah, I noticed him and the clerk exchanging weird looks and giving me half-assed courtesy smiles. When I dumped my three bottles on the counter and told them what I was making, they explained the odd looks. Turns out the store has to keep the stuff close to the counter as apparently it’s a main component of meth (which explains the scarcity of Lye on shelves). Local meth chefs had been making a habit of waiting for the store to get busy, then scooping it off the shelves and out the door, so they keep a close eye on it. Yikes. Have you ever felt like a criminal even when you know you’re not? I promised the clerk a bar of soap to prove my innocence. Moving on…
Crockpot Coffee Soap
Supplies needed:
- Coffee
- Olive Oil
- Palm Oil (Canola oil)
- Coconut Oil
- Almond or Castor oil
- Lye
I used the step by step tutorial from Heart, Hands, Home. The project was going well until my crockpot went turbo on me and cooked the holy hell out of the soap. This is what their’s looked like after cooking in the crockpot, then putting into the Pringles can mold…
Nice and fluffy!
And here’s what mine looked like…
A hard-as-a-rock, oozing hot mess!
Their soap dry and cut into bars…
Perfection!
Mine…
I couldn’t even get a slice cut in one piece to display.
I wrote this project off as a fail and walked away from it. When the hubs came home and saw the mess on the kitchen counter, he suggested power tools. I laughed. He wasn’t kidding…
You ROCK, my contractor husband!
He totally saved my soap. The bars were perfect, and this soap is awesome! Now, obvs I made some small errors somewhere in the construction. My first problem was the cooker: I used a crockpot I had since replaced because the heating element had gone haywire and cooked everything on, like, broil. My second problem was the cook: I packed the soap into the mold too tightly, which caused it to push itself out of the mold. In addition, I’ve mentioned my personality glitch before, that when a recipe suggests one drop of something , I assume three would be better? Yeah Pat, not so much. Stick to the recipe numb nuts.
And here’s how my soap turned out. Pretty cool, huh?
Success! Note to self: Stuff table saw into my soapmaking supply box.
To go with the soap, I wanted to make a coffee body scrub. This one is a no-brainer and you can whip it up in minutes. It smells like fresh brewed coffee and makes your skin feel like baby butt cheeks.
Coffee Body Scrub
I followed the recipe:
- 1/2 cup ground coffee
- 1/2 cup sugar
- 2 tbsp cinnamon
- 1/4 cup olive oil
- a few drops vanilla (or whatev) essential oil
Just mix in a clean jar, label it and add a scoop. Voila! Seriously, this takes under five minutes to make.
Wrapped up in a pretty little gift bag, this soap and scrub is an inexpensive, handmade Valentine’s or Mother’s Day gift for coffee-lovin’ mamas that’s really easy to make. Go for it! Let us know how it turns out!
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Have fun!
