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    homemade for the holidays II

    Clean up for the new year: A step-by-step guide to making homemade soap

    Leila Kalmbach
    Dec 26, 2011 | 8:00 am
    • First step: gather all of your ingredients.
      Photo by Leila Kalmbach
    • Then mix sodium hydroxide and water.
      Photo by Leila Kalmbach
    • Measure out oils.
      Photo by Leila Kalmbach
    • Carefully mix lye and oils.
      Photo by Leila Kalmbach
    • Pour the mixture into molds.
      Photo by Leila Kalmbach
    • Finally, add your color.
      Photo by Leila Kalmbach
    • And your finished product
      Photo by Leila Kalmbach

    If giving the gift of infused vodka wasn’t for you, take it a step further and really impress your friends by giving them homemade soap. Soap is a little more complicated to make than flavored booze, but it’s fun and you get to feel like you’re back in chemistry class. It involves two separate chemical reactions — and in the end you get a useful product instead of a burnt vial and a room that smells like sulfur.

    (Before we get started, though, I should say something: Let’s be realistic. Soap takes at least four weeks to cure. If you do give bars of soap as gift (or use it for yourself), let them cure as long as possible, then wrap them in a breathable paper and just tell your friends to wait until the right date to use them.)

    At its essence, soap is just three things: sodium hydroxide (lye), water and fat. The type of fat you use will have a big impact on the final product — an all-coconut-fat soap, for instance, will have a nice fluffy lather, but can be drying to the skin. Palm oil soap doesn’t create much lather, but it makes a firm bar that won’t dissolve quickly.

    Different oils have different nourishing properties, as well. Olive oil is moisturizing. Avocado oil is high in vitamins and amino acids, which moisturize and heal the skin (great for winter). Jojoba oil helps to retain moisture in the skin. Most soaps contain a combination of oils that work together to achieve the desired effect. Grapefruit seed extract and/or vitamin E work as a preservative.

     

      Carefully pour the lye into the oil, stirring briskly with a whisk or the rubber spatula. The mixture will thicken. Keep stirring! And keep not touching, as the lye will still burn. 

    I made my soap with my friend Shirene, who has made eight batches now and doesn’t ever buy soap anymore. Soap-making requires a few free hours, some pans you won’t need for the next month, and patience. There are as many soap recipes out there as there are cookie recipes, but here’s what we did:

    This recipe makes about 10 pounds of almond-avocado soap with orange–pine needle scent (yes, we could probably stand to come up with a snazzier name).

     What you'll need

    402 grams sodium hydroxide

    2 lb., 6 oz. distilled water

    4 oz. jojoba oil

    6.5 oz. cocoa butter (the kind we found contained 25 percent jojoba oil)

    12.5 oz. sweet almond oil

    8 oz. avocado oil

    8 oz. wheat germ oil

    2 lb. coconut oil

    24 oz. palm oil

    8 oz. olive oil

    24 grams grapefruit seed extract

    60 mL pine needle essential oil

    118 mL orange essential oil

    15 mL peppermint essential oil

    Getting together the ingredients can take some work. Keep in mind that lye is caustic, so its sale is more closely regulated than, say, essential oils. You’ll probably have to give them your name so that if you blow something up, they’ll know who to blame. You can find palm oil in the African foods section at Fiesta.

     Step 1: Make sure you have everything you’ll need.

    Get out all your ingredients, a scale, a large pot, a glass bowl, a rubber spatula, a cooking thermometer, rubber gloves and safety goggles. You have all these things, right? Right? OK, good.

     Step 2: Mix the lye and water.

    Put on the safety goggles and gloves. Take photos of yourself looking ridiculous. Carefully measure out the sodium hydroxide in a small bowl or cup, and measure out the distilled water in the glass bowl. Take these containers and the rubber spatula outside to a well-ventilated area, and very carefully pour the sodium hydroxide into the water, stirring briskly with the rubber spatula until it is dissolved.

    This is your first chemical reaction: The mixture will instantly get very hot and start steaming. Don’t breathe in the fumes. Once the sodium hydroxide is dissolved, cover the bowl to keep leaves and dust out. Make sure pets and children are inside while the lye solution is sitting out.

     Step 3: Mix and melt the fats.

    You can take the safety goggles and gloves off now, unless you just really like the look. Weigh out all the fats and mix them together in the large pot over low heat, stirring until the solid fats melt. Many of the fats we used came in containers that already claimed to be the right weight, but Shirene, being less lazy than I am, suggested we measure them out to be sure. Smart girl — almost all of the containers came in underweight. We added extra almond, olive or jojoba oil to make up for the differences.

     Step 4: Sit back and wait — oh, and line some baking pans.

    Once the fats are all melted together, make sure the mixture is more than 80 degrees (unless you use Celsius, then I have no idea), and turn off the heat. Line some baking pans on the bottom and sides with waxed paper, and tape the paper at the edges. For us, the above recipe filled two loaf pans and a large cake pan.

     

      Put on the safety goggles and gloves. Take photos of yourself looking ridiculous. 

    Sit around for a while and talk about work. Eat some Thai soup (really, any kind of soup will do). Drink some tea (not beer, or you’ll mess something up and the lye will burn your fingers off). Periodically measure the temperatures of the lye mixture and the oil mixture, and wait for them both to get to 80 degrees, reheating the oil a bit if necessary.

     Step 5: Mix it all together.

    Now comes the second chemical reaction. Once both mixtures are at 80 degrees, take the oil outside, put the gloves and goggles back on, and slowly and carefully pour the lye into the oil, stirring briskly with a whisk or the rubber spatula. The mixture will thicken. Keep stirring! And keep not touching, as the lye will still burn. Try to keep all the liquid in motion. After a few minutes, the solution will “come to a trace,” meaning that if you lift up the whisk and drizzle the solution back into itself, it will leave a faint pattern on the solution’s surface for a moment.

     Step 6: Mix in the essential oils and pour into pans.

    Once the solution comes to a trace, work quickly to pour in the essential oils and mix well, then pour the mixture into the waxed paper–lined pans. We tried to make a pattern on the surface of a couple of our trays with food coloring, but we won’t know for sure whether this was a brilliant idea or a grave mistake until we try out the soap and see if our skin turns green.

     Step 7: Wait. Then cut. Then wait.

    Put the pans somewhere where they won’t be disturbed, cover them with cardboard or plywood, and cover that with a blanket. Then don’t touch them. Don’t do it! After a day or two (some sources say four to 10 days, so apparently it can vary), start gently poking at the soap, and once it feels firm all the way through, cut into slices lengthwise and crosswise all the way to the bottom of the pan.

    Then peel the bars out of the pans and lay them out flat in a single layer on plain paper grocery bags in a well-ventilated room. Let them sit for four to six weeks to cure, turning them over halfway through. Then wrap them as you wish and give them as gifts.

    Alright, you’re done! Now go sit in an overheated room for a few days to get your skin nice and dry, because next week we’re making homemade lotion.

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    give me shelter

    Meet the Houston architects teaching refugees to build permanent homes

    Emily Cotton
    Jun 27, 2025 | 10:46 am
    Every Shelter refugee Africa
    Photo by Moses Sawasawa
    Every Shelter educates communities on how to build homes using brick molds and local, organic materials.

    Two Rice architecture alums, and former Gensler Houston interns, Sam Brisendine and Scott Key are utilizing their top-tier education and expertise to make serious waves on a global level — and Gensler wants everyone to know about it. June is Global Giveback Month at the international design and architecture firm, and Every Shelter, the charitable organization founded by Brisendine and Key, is getting the spotlight with a new exhibit in the lobby of Gensler’s office in downtown Houston titled “Why We Flee.”

    Photographed by 26-year-old war photojournalist Moses Sawasawa, “Why We Flee” shines a light on one of the world’s largest drivers of human displacement today: an endless conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or DRC. Also on display are the common goods that Every Shelter helps to repurpose into supplies and tools that refugees can then use to design and build their own permanent homes themselves.

    Every Shelter focuses on designing, building, and supplying permanent shelter solutions for homeless and displaced war and natural disaster refugees. Based in Houston, TX, and Kampala, Uganda, Every Shelter works directly with newly-arriving refugees from the DRC in Nakivale Refugee Settlement in the southwest of the country.

    Every Shelter is unique in that they are “community led, expert supported,” and teach communities how to design and build for their own communities. Megan Mark, director of advancement at Every Shelter, tells CultureMap about a design studio that they are currently piloting at their Ugandan office.

    “We have a humanitarian aid architect there and a program manager. They work with the social innovation leads, who are typically refugees who we’ve employed to help us navigate refugees’ needs in the context of the environment that they are in,” she says. “A refugee who is in Turkey doesn’t have the same needs as a refugee in Uganda. Right now we have three architects who are still in school.”

    Humanitarian aid architects spend nine weeks leading an architecture and design curriculum for refugees between the ages of 18-30 years old. At the end of the nine weeks, the students will have designed a solution, or “intervention” as Every Shelter calls it, for a need that they have in the community.

    “We are really excited to see what they come up with,” says Lauren Hanson, community manager at Every Shelter. “We teach refugees how to make things, then certify them to be the teachers. Then they can go make their own, they can sell their own, they can even start their own business teaching others how to make these things. We want to give the power to them to take whatever intervention we come up with and utilize it. They can take any idea and scale it, and that’s what we want to happen.”

    The most coveted shelter solution by far has been the brick molds that Every Shelter supplies to the communities. While brick molds are nothing new, availability has been scarce. With high demand and low supply, local rental fees for these tools skyrocketed. The UN and the Ugandan government supply refugees with land, a UN tarp, a few poles, and a small amount of money to get settled. Refugees tend to spend 10-26 years in these settlements, far longer than the 3-6 month lifespan of a UN-supplied tarp.

    By supplying brick molds and an invaluable education in building and design — especially lessons on making bricks from local organic matter — Every Shelter can get families from living under a tarp to living in a brick home in about a year. The brick molds cost under $10 to make, and the savings from potential rental fees ($130) is the equivalent of three months of food per household, which is a huge savings for families who are trying to get their children into schools.

    Communities band together to share molds and can work together to allocate bricks in an efficient manner. One house requires approximately 1,500 bricks, and with lessons from Every Shelter, families can design and build homes that best fit their individual needs. Skylights are designed and built using recycled water bottles, and decommissioned billboards are treated and up-cycled into roofing and floor tiles, which have a lifespan of about eight years. Lessons in home repair are also instrumental for those who may need them down the line.

    The focus that Every Shelter places on design, architecture, and construction in underserved communities is something that resonates deeply with Gensler. Stephanie Burritt, managing director and principal at Gensler Houston, certainly feels a connection to the organization’s ethos.

    “When they came to us and told us what they are doing, it was just hand-in-glove in terms of how it fit with our global giveback and our focus on homelessness, and it just made a lot of sense,” Burritt tells CultureMap. “We have happy hours here with contractors, employees, vendors, and everyone who walks through here all the time asks us what this is that we are showcasing and how they can help.”

    Gensler’s summer intern class arrived the same week as the “Why We Flee” installation, and Burritt thinks it has been a good thing for them to see. “I think, for them, it was super exciting to see somebody who had been an intern — 12 years ago, or whatever it was — and go ‘Oh, wow! This is the kind of impact I can have at some point in my career that’s beyond what you see in our day-to-day work at Gensler.’ And I think that’s really special.”

    Every Shelter co-founder Scott Key enlisted college friend and curator Ben Rasmussen to oversee the installation of the exhibition. As for the subject matter, Rasmussen wants the show to be experienced in a fluid way. “Wherever you enter is how you experience it,” he says. “It can be moved through in whatever way people choose, and that sort of personal way of moving through the work kind of echoes the sort of chaotic way that people experience it on the ground. So we wanted for that to exist in a way that people can see it, without trying to force an education on a really long-running and complex conflict.”

    One benefit of the exhibition is the amount of exposure that Every Shelter is receiving from Gensler’s local contractors and vendors, with labor and materials contributions for the organization’s new Heights-area office already pouring in. “Why We Flee” hopes to find a new home after its time at Gensler comes to a close at the end of the summer, so check in with Every Shelter if a trip to Gensler this summer isn’t in the cards.

    -----

    See “Why We Flee" Monday-Friday from 9 am-5 pm at Gensler’s Houston office in 2 Houston Center (909 Fannin Street, Suite 200).


    Every Shelter refugee Africa
      

    Photo by Moses Sawasawa

    Every Shelter educates communities on how to build homes using brick molds and local, organic materials.

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