Complaining about historical methods being used on a historical methods channel? Well, that's youtube for you. Lovely to see part 2, Sally!

People complaining about you demonstrating historical procedures are watching the wrong channel. It's possible they came for the soapmaking, and were unaware of the practical archaeology basis of your channel. I'm just sorry you had to respond to them at all. Thank you for this episode. Parts 1 and 2 have gone a long way to boosting my own confidence with soapmaking. Humans have managed this for thousands of years without technology aids. I should be able to manage as well!

I used to make soap with modern lye and techniques, I knew it was different with woodash lye, but i had no idea how much different it actually is! Thank you for the video, top notch as usual :)

I AM interested in the soap making, but even more I'm just enjoying listening to your voice while knitting.

Thank you Sally for this video. I have waited for it because I wanted to know how soap was made in the old days. Now I am wandering how people found out how to make soap?? - I have made cord from horseradish after watching one of your videos and I love to try some new (old) ways of making things. I live in Iceland and we don´t have wild bramles or nettles to use, so I will try some other plants this summer. I am a pensionist and just playing, enjoying and learning a lot from youtube channels from people around the world. Have a nice trip to Italy

Sally I really love how your videos never seem canned or prebaked. When your result is a surprise to you, it's a surprise to us too. :) It comes off as very natural and sincere. Thank you.

My only comment is that at some point people had a pretty good idea of how much lye to use for how much tallow. My grandmother made soap each autumn in a huge cauldron - as a 6 yo I could step inside and crouch down, so yeah, it was big. She didn't have any books or written recipes as such. What she had was her own grandmother's pot as a measure: this many pots of lye to this many pots of fat. Yes, she would test it as she cooked it, but an experienced crafter wouldn't make too many adjustments. She also never made soft soap. All her soap was salted to harden and cured for about a month before use. About the use of historical methods : I would leave even the soft soap to cure a good long time before using it. For as long as it has moisture the unreacted lye and fats will continue to neutralize each other, although at a very slow pace since there's no stirring and the temp is too low.

Thank you Sally. Don’t listen to the haters. Your channel is amazing, I love learning from you

The salted soap looks a bit like a well-aged runny cheese in the end, which kinda-sorta makes me want to taste-test it myself. The Videos are wildy interesting, thank you, Sally!

This is great. I have a wood burning stove, so now I know what to do with the ash. I can heat and clean with no waste. I've been using ash to clean the glass of the stove so I'm truly grateful thanks

Fellow archeologist here. Another brilliant video! I always look forward to your new videos. I know I'm going to learn something new and relax at the same time!👏

Good clean fun! Haha! This is brilliant though. Having just spent most of my week washing dishes as if it were 1924 (drain trouble and the plumber couldn't get here for AGES)... it was strangely nice to watch this video, and someone ELSE boiling huge pots of water! You are exceptionally patient! And I suppose back then folks didn't feel a need to hurry through anything. Such a simple process but with such great results, very cool!

Thanks for this video, Sally. Absolutely fascinating! I have been using traditional Black Soap from France for years so it is interesting the see the process behind it and it has whet my appetite to try this. (I already make basic soap using modern lye.) The time this process takes and folks' squeamishness about the 'zap test' made me think of something my mum always said when I was growing up: "we don't know we are born..." If households still had to go to such efforts to achieve a basic cleaning product, maybe we would really appreciate what a luxury soap and being able to keep things clean actually are.

Yay! The much-awaited soap follow-up! Thank you, Sally :-)

Your presentations are really fascinating! I love the respect that you have for both our forbearers and for us. Passing down this know-how feels like a celebration of life that echoes through time to me. Thank you!!

Sally I just want to say you’ve been such a huge inspiration to my interest in history. I’ve always been incredibly interested in just the daily lives of ancient people and how we started creating things and you actually encouraged me to get a history degree. I would have gone into something I hated if it wasn’t for you inspiring me and showing just how amazing these things are and how happy studying history makes me. So thank you for genuinely changing my life.

I love this video. You've been methodical, patient, and thorough. You can absolutely do a few things to refine the process within historical norms. However, you have definitely explored the gradients on the way.

I've been waiting for part 2 for *ages!* Thank you for the update! ❤ 👍

this is a delightful video, THANK YOU! and oooh, when you took the pot to the sink to add the water, it took me right back to my soapmaking days in the 90s. most of hte people i knew made cold process bc it's faster. but i'm disabled and have horribly sensitive skin, so i always made hot process. a little more time to cook it til it was soap meant easy clean up + happy skin! 😻😻😻

„The most important ingredient of a cake, is time.“ - Master Mirror

IT'S PART TWO!!!!!

Excellent demo! I loved your demo of the historic way that soapmakers judged the quality and progress of their batch of soap.

Insane that I’ve only just now found your channel. It’s a goldmine and this is one of many things I’ve wondered about before! Thank you

I’m Navajo and just dug up some narrow leaf yucca root for hair washing. Other tribes in the area have used it for millennia! A little maceration and water and you have shampoo or body wash. Very effective! Other tribes used soap lily. This was fun to watch though. When I get a fire pit going I’ll try this! Axhe’hee.

Awesome video! Thank you for sharing!

I was wondering if you'd ever get back to the ash lye soap. Not that it mattered too much if you did or didn't, life is busy and all your videos are worth waiting for. This has lead me to wonder if I can make soap out of the old Crisco that lurks (almost malevolently) in the back of my pantry... Might need to try it for science, it's a little too far gone for cooking anyway....

in the middle east it was common and still is, to make soup from olive oil. I tried once to do soap with local olive oil and it was great!! I really want to try this style of diy lye

As I know, the soap need to wait quite some time for aging. I don’t really know for what but I saw it in many videos about natural soap making. Oh, and you forget to mention the most important ingredient for the historical soap-making! The Elbow Grease!😂

Very interesting. I started making cold process soap so I could recognize the stages of making soap the old way.

Thanks Sally! I've been waiting for part 2.

This is very interesting! Thank you.

Lye is used to strip the seasoning off cast iron when restoring.

I like watching ur vids!

So fascinating to see the process and learn how people in the old days did things. Excellent video.

Waiting for this video is one of the reasons I subscribed to you. Thank you for this video! Your channel has been quite a mental treat for me :)

Thanks for this tutorial video. Greet from Slovakia. 😀🖖👍

Dripping aka tallow, and lard make great soap. Soap making can be incredibly involved, and using modern materials and colourants, you can make GORGEOUS bars, however, it’s very simple to make a simple soap with a few commonsense safety precautions. Mainly respect the lye, cos it’s dangerous. Having said that, “zap” testing IS a thing and was done for centuries(and yes I’ve DONE it…I’m still alive)……..today it’s anathema and folk make a big fuss about it, for good reason tbh. It’s takes that rare quality, common bloody sense, which appears to be in rather short supply, to not either poison yourself or burn your tongue. And tbh I wouldn’t do it with modern highly concentrated lye, which is an ENTIRELY different beast from home produced wood ash lye…….much MUCH stronger. The thing is , there are nuances to take into account when using things like home produced wood ash lye, and nuance seems to be something that is lost today. Oh, and btw, in HP (hot process)soap making, that boiling up is called “volcanoing” lol. It freaks beginners out 😂. The transparency you’re talking about is what we call the Vaseline stage, which is where the soap has “gelled” which is a pretty reliable sign it’s fully cooked. And yes we still add salt(sodium chloride) to soaps to assist with hardening.

Totally brilliant! I love seeing how this all came together ❤ Thank you!

Thanks for the Vid Sally , I've been waiting for part two 8)

Fascinating! Thank you!

It's truly an art :)

Thank You Sally.❤

Great video

Thank you for teaching about the old ways!

awesome. got to try it.

Thank you for the great lesson. Just loved it!!!!

Brilliant Sally! I love your methods

Such a good video thankyou so much🌿

Brilliant

This was amazing and informative. Thank you.

Really want to try this! Thanks for sharing

Using vinegar helps to create additional chemical reactions. You're better off rinsing very well with running water. Also, you should use a spoon or at least more of a "mixing" motion as opposed to the "whisking". You were throwing drops of soap batter all over.

Oh my goodness, I've just discovered and subscribed to your channel! It's my favourite now 😍 So many exciting videos, I'm thrilled to have found you. Thank you ♥️

The EXARC talk is excellent.

I'm fascinated with soap. All kinds. I have a huge container that I squirrel away. Lol. IDK why.

Nice

i've been looking a lot into historical and evolution of haircare, mainly hairwashing/hair hygene strategies. I am under the impression that using plain soap (soft soap and castille soap tend to come the most recomended) became common practice around the mid-late victorian era into the edwardian era when soap, skincare and hygiene became industrialised and commercialised. Haircare in the 18th century works in a totally different way but the very few sources i found for before the common use of hair powdering tend to recommend monthly-weekly use of vine ash in water, i tend to put it aside as a disparity between what was written down and what people actually did, but come to think of it, they probably had much better litteracy of what lye is safe than we do today ad using a weak lye would work pretty well as a stripping agent in a context where other products would be less practical to use. When looking into what other cultures (mainly the diné people, historical han/chinese and the yao/red hmong women) traditionally do, haircare seems to work in a simiar way (hair tying and covering to prevent dirt and dust, frequent combing and rare use of a degreasing agent, mainly saponin heavy local plants with oiling as a styling and conditioning product). The fact i only see it being mentionned in the early 20th century (a belgian housekeeping manual from 1903 reprinted around 1919 mentions soap bark) makes me believe it was either not something that was worthy of mentioning earlier, not something that was done in europe before we took that up from other cultures or that we don't really have that many plants with the same properties... but the saponaria was use as a detergent in roman era but i havent seen it mentioned as a possibility for haircare purposes. Which makes the curiosity of ancient roman haircare even more baffling : i believe they didn't use lye based product because the alledged use of lime by gaulish people is regarded as different and striking, i guessed that hair combing would have been enough as it is quite similar to the oil scrapping they were famous for doing (and mosaic and statues don't really translate the greasiness of the hair the same way it's easy to see if hair was pomaded or powdered in the 17th - 19th century portraiture) but hair washing with water was part of their culture, if the mention i have found online is to be believed (still haven't found the source sadly, i'm grasping at straws) they had a ritual of washing the hair in a lake concecrated to diana on her special day in august. Soap would be adequate enough but it was really expensive to make so wouldn't have been able to everyone (so what did commonfolk do then) and it's terribly uncommon later on, wasn't seemed to be used regularly for anything outside of textile production so even if plausible it's a highly unsatisfactory option to me. Saponaria was common in laundering so i believe it would have been the easiest cleansing agent available to them , maybe is was ubiquitous enough to just not be mentioned in texts (i tried extracting saponin from nettles last august and it worked surprsingly well as a mild hair wash) but then why was lye preferred a millenium later? why was saponaria not more synonimous with cleanliness like lavender became? was it just easier further north to make our own lye? or maybe lye being more astringent required less frequent washing? i had in mind to give a shot at all of my hypotheses but life got in the way, i guess it's now time to resume

YAY 🎉

in soap making groups when i first started making soap one question kept coming up - how do you clean up afterward? - i would just shake my head.

I thought you're making bath soap but found out in the end it's laundry soap

ive tried and sort of worked, but i did get soap - so thnzz sooo very much!!!! ps i did not die of tasteing it lol

Could you give us an idea of the strength of these products relative to a modern usage? Like what volume would be used for a modern load of laundry or dish washup? Or is it similar cleaning strength to currently popular cleaning products?

Thank you Sally. In your first soap video you mentioned doing you were doing your PHD. How'd it go? I remember watching that video and being excited about what you'd have to say about the history/origin of soap. Many thanks for all the wonderful videos and information 😊

Thank you for that. I think I'll stick to modern methods using commercial sodium hydroxide! Fascinating, though.

Perfect video for a stormy Texas morning! You may mention it in the video, but I'll ask just in case I miss it: are the wash balls safe for modern appliances, or strictly hand washing? How might I use it in a modern off-grid home with a bucket and plunger type of wash machine?

Thank you very much for this tutorial. It makes me want to try it. You sad about washing fleeces with it. How does your wool turn out with it? I use french black soap with a pinch of dish soap, since the addition of soda dryed the wool out. Well I'm still looking for the right fleece washing method. Have you tried the suint fermentation method yet? If so, did you like the procede and the result of it? Thank you again for this great video and this pragmatic approach.

This is so interesting! Out of curiosity, do you know of other ways to test the consistency without touching or tasting?

Well worth the wait. I'm going to have a go. I was wondering if we know when we first started making soap? Is it a pre or post metal thing? I was just thinking that you could do it with pottery and the coals of the cooking fire, so maybe it could be a Stone Age thing. (Sorry, don't know all the proper names for relevant time frames)

I heard that if you get splashed wash it off for 15 minutes then if that doesnt work, seek medical attention. 😮

How can I support this channel? Do you have a subscription model? Happy to support great content makers like yourself. I adore your videos.

😄👍

I enjoyed the process, the tasting, but I prefer a faster method and no animal fat in my 600 years old recipe soap.- not hot method either. Why do people think that bubbles are so important? they have no cleaning properties

Seems like a really great soap, hope I can have a go at trying all this at some point. According to Fight Club, human fat is best! Talking of which, I thought it said to put vinegar straight on lye burn, not water? Is there an ideal temp it needs to be held at?

21:00 Now I know how roadside cafés make such awful tea.

Hey is It alright if some dirt gets mixed in with my woodash?

*Can you make soap using beeswax as the primary fat?*

When, at what stage, could you add lavender or other flowers/herbs for scent.

Would the soft soap be suitable for washing dishes?

What do you use this soap for? what's the PH? Can it be a hand and body wash?

and if it eats your wire whisk then you have to much lye LOL no noNO! I am the comedian.

I am Jack's soap tutorial on youtube

nothing that dangerous there,to be honest its the safest procdure ever,you can taste and all

It almost seems a shame to expend so much energy on such a small amount of product.

1:40 Smegma.

Don't let people being booty bothered and unable to scroll from what they don't agree with get you down, Sally. 🤍 Glad to see the part two!! I have yet again been given knowledge that will exasperate my roommates 😂 I will not use this responsibly (joking tone)