How easy it was! Just a few simple ingredients – tallow, olive oil, coconut oil, lye, and water.

Safety: Gloves, fresh air and common sense are all you need to avoid harm. Wearing goggles and a mask will provide extra protection. Mix lye and water in an area with good ventilation in a glass or ceramic bowl (it will heat up). Don’t put your face near or breathe the fumes – lye burns.

Mix and heat the tallow and oils on medium, while stirring, before mixing the lye and water in a separate bowl. Once the fumes from the lye/water have dissipated, measure the temperatures of both mixtures. They must both come within a range of 100-110 degree F before combining them.

After my year of teaching Chemistry at our homeschool co-op, it was fascinating to learn that each recipe needed a different ratio of oils to lye. Each oil has a different chemical make-up (unique combinations of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, basically) and will react a different amount of lye.

Enough oil must be added to react all the lye, plus extra for insurance. No lye should be left in your bars to irritate people’s skin. Kelly’s book explains how each ingredient has its own SAP value, which you can use in an equation to come up with your own ‘recipes.’ I highly recommend getting her book to start your own ‘soap adventures.’

The limited availability of long skirts for girls has always been frustrating. I don’t mind paying a company like Lilies of the Field (http://www.liliesapparel.com/) to make formal clothes my daughters will only wear on occasions not likely to damage them. But when it comes to play clothes for my ten-year-old, Margaret, the cost gives me pause. My secular, modern upbringing, focused as it was on do-well-in-school, do-well-in-school, do-well-in-school, left me ill prepared to deal with this dilemma. An offer from a family friend, however, finally overcame our natural resistance to taking the time to learn a new skill.

So here’s the recipe for a simple elastic waistband skirt, one for which Margaret was able to do much of the work.

To calculate the fabric yardage: Measure from the waist down to where the bottom of the skirt will fall. Add 2 1/2 inches for the waist band and 3 1/2 inches for the hem. So length of skirt plus 6 inches. For example: a 30 inch long skirt + 6 inches x 2 (for front and back of the skirt) = 2 yards of fabric. Choose any medium weight, mostly cotton fabric. We decided to start with a solid colored fabric, no plaids or prints that needed to be matched. This skirt does not have in-seam pockets, but we plan to add patch pockets at some point. You’ll also need 1-inch wide elastic and a spool of matching thread (a small spool is fine). We added a row of purchased lace around the hem for decoration.

Wash and iron the material first. We didn’t measure a width, but used the width the fabric came in. Since the elastic will determine the waist, the fabric width just changes the skirt’s ‘puffiness.’ It turns out that cotton fabric can quite easily be torn along a thread, so we didn’t have to ‘pull threads’ to straighten the edges. Once our rectangle was ‘squared,’ we folded it wrong-side out, the seam edges meeting, and pinned along the seam. The pins should be perpendicular to the seam. Margaret did the honors of sewing a straight line along the seam by machine (1/2 inch seam allowance), using the matching color thread. We finished the seam edgewith pinking shears to avoid fraying. There are nicer ways, but for a play skirt, this was quick and easy. Press open the two sides of the seam.

Pinking Shears

At the top edge of the skirt, with the wrong side still facing out, fold down a 1/4 to a 1/2 inch of fabric and press flat with an iron. Then fold again, 1 inch plus a little more for the elastic to slide through easily, from the previously folded edge. Press and pin. Sew as close to the edge of the fold as possible, leaving a couple inches open to work the elastic in. Measure around the person’s waist, reduce this by 1 inch, and cut the elastic to this length. Attach one end of the elastic to the skirt where the opening is using a safety pin. Then attach a large safety pin to the other end of the elastic and work it through the waistline casing you have made. Overlap the two ends of elastic by 1/2 to 3/4 inch and sew together. Sew the opening closed, by machine or hand.

At the bottom edge of the skirt, with the wrong side still facing out, fold down a 1/4 to a 1/2 inch of fabric and press flat with an iron. Then fold again to desired width of hem. Press. If desired, cut and pin your lace to the inside of the hem as you pin the hem. Then sew all together using your matching-colored thread.

And that’s it! Enjoy your new skirt.

Margaret in her new play skirt.