Inside the Soap Room: How We Make Our Small-Batch Soap
There’s a lot that happens before a Lavender & Thistle bar ever reaches your soap dish.
Our soap is made in small batches, with each recipe thoughtfully developed around the ingredients, scent, color, texture, and experience we want the finished bar to have. It isn’t a process we rush—and that’s exactly the point.
It Starts With the Ingredients
Before we ever mix a batch, we choose each ingredient for the role it will play in the finished soap.
One of the foundations of many of our recipes is hand-rendered beef tallow, a traditional soapmaking ingredient valued for creating a firm, long-lasting bar with a rich, creamy lather.
Depending on the recipe, we pair it with thoughtfully selected oils, butters, clays, botanicals and other ingredients such as colloidal oatmeal, goat milk, honey or activated charcoal.
Every bar has its own recipe and its own reason for being made the way it is.
Rendering Our Tallow
For the bars that contain tallow, part of the process begins before we ever make soap.
We render the beef fat ourselves, slowly separating and purifying the tallow until it is clean and ready for soapmaking.
Could we buy finished tallow and skip this step? Absolutely.
But doing it ourselves gives us a connection to the process we love—the same kind of practical, traditional craftsmanship that inspired Lavender & Thistle in the first place.
Making the Batch
Once our ingredients are prepared and carefully measured, the actual soapmaking begins.
The oils, butters and tallow are combined with our lye solution to begin saponification—the chemical reaction that transforms oils and lye into soap.
Then comes the creative part.
Depending on the bar, we may add oatmeal, goat milk, honey, charcoal, botanicals, color, essential oils or fragrance oils before the soap is poured into its molds.
Because our batches are made by hand, slight variations are part of the beauty of the process. No two pours are ever exactly alike.
Cut, Cured & Finished by Hand
Making the soap is only the beginning.
After the loaf has set, we unmold it and cut it into individual bars. Then the bars are placed on our curing racks, where they're given time to become the firm, long-lasting bars we want them to be.
There is no shortcut for this part.
Once they're ready, the bars are inspected and finished before making their way to you.
Made Slowly. Made Thoughtfully.
Small-batch soap making is part science, part tradition and part creativity.
We could make things faster. We could outsource more of the process. But Lavender & Thistle was never meant to be about producing as much soap as possible.
It's about making something useful and beautiful with our own hands.
And we think that makes the wait worthwhile.
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