 Hello! Today's video is taking place in the little garden kitchen where I am going to show you a quick method for an herbal oil infusion using flowers and weeds from my garden. Herbal infusions are a wonderful ingredient to add to any of your homemade salves, soaps or other body care recipes. Today I have used it in a batch of my homemade soap where I have attempted to create a bit of a camo design using natural colors. Stay tuned for the soap cutting at the end of this video to see how it turned out. So one of my favorite all-natural infusions to make for my soaps and salves is an infusion using plantain weed and calendula flowers. So both of these I have collected from my yard over the summer, dried them out and when it's time to do an infusion I like to use hemp seed oil. Again another wonderful thing for the skin and I also add some avocado. Just to make that hemp seed oil go a little bit further because it is quite expensive. So today because I want to use this in some soap that I'm making I'm going to use the faster method of infusion which means I will be putting it on a double boiler on the stove for a couple hours just to speed up the infusion process. Normally I would just add the oils to the jar here and let it sit on the shelf for several weeks, but I'm falling a little bit behind this fall so we're going to use the fast method today. Another great thing about the hemp seed oil is it has a beautiful natural green color which I'm going to use as a natural coloring in my soap today. So I've placed my oil infusion now into a pot of water which I am warming up slowly and you should always try to maintain a temperature of the water and of the oil infusion somewhere in between 160 to 170 degrees Fahrenheit. So before I add my lice to the oils here I always like to add some clay to my soaps because I love that extra additive in my soap. It gives a little bit of slippage to your soap if you want to use it as a shaving bar and it's also great for your skin. So I'm adding some green French clay today so that it's going to give it a bit of a green tinge hopefully. So I'm going to mix that in now and then we are ready to add the lye water. So when I make soap I always use the high temperature countertop method which is where you heat up your oils to approximately 200 to 220 degrees Fahrenheit and then add in your lye water which you have just mixed up and is usually around the 200 degree Fahrenheit temperature as well. So once I have added the lye water to the oils I use my hand blender to just incorporate the two and continually stir it until it starts to thicken. So this can take about 2 to 5 minutes of continuous blending with the hand blender until you get it to a thick stage which I like to call trace. It's kind of like a pudding type consistency and once you've reached that point you can stop the hand blending and then I just put the lid on and let the soap cook. So I'm going to use some of my infusion here that I made with the hemp seed oil and the calendula and plantain wheat. I'm going to strain it through and it's going to be used as a part of my super fat that I'll be adding to today's soaps. You can see here the hemp seed color has come through so there's a nice green tinge to this additive which should help for the final coloring of the soap. So I'm going to try adding another natural colorant to my soap just to help enhance that green color even further. This is spirulina powder that I picked up at a health food store. So I'm going to stir in a couple teaspoons into my oils here and let that sit for a while and it will add a little more green color to the oils. So I'm going to be using activated charcoal as another colorant in today's soap. So what I'm doing here is I'm just taking a bit of the oil from my super fat and I'm dispersing a couple tablespoons of the activated charcoal into it. At the end of the cook when the soap is ready I will separate a bit of soap and color it with this activated charcoal. Activated charcoal is also a great skin loving property to have in your soaps. It helps treat oily skin or acne prone skin. It can help smooth wrinkles. And it also provides moisture to dry skin so I always like to add this into my soaps. So you always want to keep an eye on your soap while it is cooking and watch for it when it starts to volcano. So it's been about five to seven minutes and as you can see here it is starting to bubble up in volcano. So I need to just gently stir it down. You don't want to stir too hard or too fast while you end up splattering it. So you just slowly stir it down. Sometimes you need to stir and let it volcano more than once before it fully saponifies and turns into soap in this batch here today. I had to give it another blend with the hand blender so I just slowly blend in different areas of the soap and watch it to see if it starts to volcano again. And as you can see here it is starting to volcano so I'm quickly trying to clean the excess soap out of my hand blender which sometimes you just can't do fast enough. You have to keep an eye on it and make sure it doesn't bubble over or you will have a big mess. So I'm just gently stirring it down again. So you do a lot of stirring at this point and just kind of watch the consistency. So as you can see my batter is still quite runny here so I'm going to give it another buzz with my hand blender and as you can see it has volcanoing up again. So I'll stir it down again and just give it a good stir until we have reached the bonification. So after a lot of stirring this can be very hard on your arms and shoulders. I kind of have to switch back and forth between hands but I just keep stirring and I can see now that the soap is holding together. It's starting to thicken up into what kind of looks like a mashed potato type consistency. So after a lot of stirring the soap kind of transfers from that mashed potato stage to what we call the Vaseline stage. So if you have a look at the soap it has kind of a waxy look to it and at that point your soap should be ready. And this is when I usually do a zap test to make sure that it is fully saponified. So when I do the zap test I just take a small amount of the soap on my glove here and make sure I cool it off and I just gently touch it to my tongue. If I get a zap that means that the soap is not ready, it's not fully saponified. If it tastes like soap then you know it is ready to add the rest of your additives too. So the zap test confirmed that I have soap now. I was able to get a bit of a lather out of it so I am going to now add the rest of my ingredients to the soap. So the first ingredient I'm going to add is my goat's milk. So this is goat's milk that I have gotten from a local farmer. I've warmed it up to a nice warm temperature so that when you add it in it doesn't shock the soap. Goat's milk in addition to being wonderful for the skin. It also naturally contains sodium lactate which helps give you a nice hard bar of soap. So after you have given that a good stir to make sure that goat's milk is fully incorporated I'm going to add the super fat. So this has shea butter and my infused oils along with the green colorants that I've added. So the benefit of adding the super fat after the cook is all these oils and fats will not lose their skin loving properties because they did not go through the saponification process. And the result is you end up with a beautiful moisturizing body bar that your skin is going to love. So after I've fully incorporated my super fats I let my soap sit for a few minutes and get ready to add the essential oils and then do the coloring with our activated charcoal. So I'm really happy with the consistency of the soap right now. It's still nice and runny. It's going to be easy to work with when we do our coloring. So I'm going to slowly add in the essential oils. My favorite scent is the patchouli orange combination which I use a lot in my soaps. So this is a blend of patchouli oil, sweet orange along with a little bit of lavender essential oil that always helps kind of anchor that scent in your soap. So I am going to give it a really good stir to fully incorporate my essential oils. So now it's time to do the coloring with the activated charcoal. You have to work very fast because the soap will start to harden as it cools. So what I've done is I've taken a measuring cup and put boiling water in it so the cup is nice and warm and doesn't shock the soap when you put it in there. So after I've filled up with about three quarters of a cup of soap I'm going to add in my activated charcoal mixture and stir it in really good. Okay, so now that we have these two colors mixed up it is time to get the soap into the molds. So you need to move fairly fast when you're working with hot process soap because it can harden quite quickly as it cools. So I am going to fill up the mold here about one third of the way up with the green colored soap and then I'm just going to take the black and put a few blobs here and there. Give it a little bit of a bang so you don't have any air pockets and then I'm going to go back to the green coloring and load it up with some more green soap. So I have just enough of the black left now to do another layer with that color here and there on top of the green. Always remember to give your loaf pan a good bang so that you don't have air pockets at the end. So the top layer will be all green now. If I had a bit more of the black left I would have put some more on the top for an accent color but it just didn't work out that way today. And the rest of the green soap I'm just going to put into these molds that I have here and then from there my soap will go into the deep freeze. I like to freeze it for at least three hours but usually leave it in the deep freeze for about 24 hours before bringing out and unmolding. Okay so we have unmolded the soaps here and they have been curing on my counter for a few days and as you can see the green color has come through nicely in my soaps. I'm very happy with just the natural light green tone that the soap has. And over here is my loaf that I have tempted a bit of a camo design in using the green clay and some activated charcoal. So let's get ready to give this a cut and see how it looks inside. Sometimes I like to just give these strings a little tightening to loosen up a little bit. Okay let's try the cut. So there is our first piece. It's pretty cool. Still a little bit of curing that needs to happen in the interior of the soap. It's still a little bit of moisture in there that needs to work its way out but in another week or so there should be a nice hard bar ready for the shower. As you can see every piece has a different pattern in it. So I hope you enjoyed watching how I make herbal infusions with some of my weeds and flowers for my yard and how I naturally color my handmade soaps. So if you enjoyed this video I hope that you will give it a like, leave a comment and don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on any future videos coming to my channel. Thanks for watching.