Page 262 - The Lost Ways

- By S. Walter -

“I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap

bubble if there were only one in the world.”

– Mark Twain

For a long time, most people used to make items for everyday use on their own.

Soap was no exception.

Before large industries came, people would use a variety of techniques to come up with
the best-smelling, longest-lasting soap for their needs.

This skill will come in handy when surviving an incident that makes access to commercial
soap impossible. It is a neat trick every survivalist and prepper should know from the word
go.

History

Our ancestors didn’t have the luxury of the mainstream industries we’ve had since the
Industrial Revolution. This means that getting your hand on lye, let alone commercially
prepared soap, was impossible. Processed oil, be it coconut oil or olive oil, was also hard
to come by. The solution that lay in the most important soap-making ingredients could
only be found in a natural and rather impure form of wood ash and lard.

Lye is, in essence, a strong alkali. Hardwood ash is a rich alkali, hence a sound substitute
to modern-day commercial lye. Passing clean water through this ash and letting it decant
onto a container was all they needed to create a strong lye solution. Since distilling water
was still a complicated process back then, our ancestors found their pure water in
rainwater.

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