lye soap love

My mom brought me a bar of Grandma's Lye Soap about a month ago. I use basic bar soap as a stain remover (works really well on biological stains like food and poops) and she thought a bar of lye soap would work even better than my random bar of zest soap. So, I opened the bar of lye soap and promptly fell in love! The ingredients include lard, water, and lye. That's it! I started out just using it to help remove poop stains from all these training pants. (Oh how I lament the decision not to try elimination communication in lieu of traditional potty training -- the extra effort when they were tiny would have been WELL worth the effort!) The lye soap not only removes the discoloration quickly, but zaps the not-so-sweet smell of fresh toddler poo in seconds! YAY!

Well, I didn't stop there. I had some onions to slice one day and wondered if it would remove the onion smell from my fingers faster than lemon juice and baking soda. It does!

Next I tried peeling a little into the wash with a cheese grater, some white vinegar, and a little Borax (simple, homemade laundry detergent). That worked too. The clothes were clean, fresh smelling, and soft without fabric softner; but it does take two rinse cycles to get the soap all out.

All of this was great! But the best happened when I decided to try it in the bathtub. Our kiddos all have excema (patches of severe dry skin) that comes and goes based on their allergies (ah the joys of living in the pollen-rich south!). As I researched lye soap I read a few threads on some sites that declared the wonder of lye soap as body wash, especially for sensitive skin and excema. The results: the two stubborn patches of excema on J's sweet little cheeks are almost clear! N's sandpaper back is becoming smoother and softer! And they all smell fabulous without any fragrance added!

Hooray for old-fashioned lye soap!