Nestled on the side of beautiful Mount Rascal in Southern Queensland is a little shed where magic happens.

The day begins when the mist is still a thick white blanket in the valley below, just the dark tops of the tallest gumtrees on the ridge showing above it.

The big pots of pure vegetable oil are gently warming and the antique timber soap molds are lined up like rows of hungry bread tins.

We fling open the door and the clean mountain air rushes in, accompanied by birdsong.

As the winter sunshine warms the shed we start to mix and pour.

We follow recipes crafted a generation ago, when no-one knew the words "synthetic detergent".

The magic starts when we mix together the lye and oil, starting the ancient process of saponification.

Then the fun begins. 

We begin to add delicious ingredients like essential oils, botanicals, herbs and spices, and amazing aromas start to waft around the little shed.

Mid morning we head out to the garden to harvest the fresh aloe vera for today's recipe.

Around lunchtime we have a visitor, the local goat milk farmer who is dropping off this morning's milking of fresh, raw, organic milk on his way up to town.

During the afternoon we pour our honey soaps, and the rich intoxicating scent of our own fresh warm honey fills the little shed.  We close the doors because the bees from the hive just 100m from the little shed might smell it and decide to keep us company!

As the sun dips towards the west, all the moulds are full, and the little shed glows with the soft rich colours of curing soap and the delicious scents of pure natural essential oils.

Tomorrow we will carefully remove the still soft loaves from their moulds, gently trim the edges and cut them into neat bars of soapy goodness!

They'll be cured here on timber racks in the open air for 6 weeks before we carefully wrap and package them ready for you to enjoy.

They will leave us to continue their soapy, sudsy journey, taking a little bit of Rascal Mountain magic with them wherever they go!

The cold-process soap method we use to craft our Rascal Mountain soaps is completely waste-free.

The big drums our oil comes in from the supplier all find a new life.. some as chook laying boxes, some as water storage for remote farms, some as rodent-proof pet food storage, some as shelters for guinea pigs, and dozens of other uses.  We have a long list of locals waiting for the next batch of empties to collect and repurpose!

Any raw ingredients which come in cardboard boxes, we re-use the boxes to send out larger orders.  Any packaging fillers like "peanuts" or shredded paper are carefully saved and re-used for despatching your orders.  Your order might come inside a box which doesnt look too pretty and has been obviously re-used, but you can appreciate it has a history!

Some of our spices come in heavy-duty foil bags, these are re-purposed as plant pot liners, they're beautifully watertight!

The cold process method produces ZERO waste water.  All water used in the soap is filtered rainwater collected of our own roof, eliminating any draw on town water supplies, and also reducing our storm water runoff.

We use solar power to provide the small amount of electricity we need.  The only electrical appliances used are small hotplates for warming oil on cold days, stick blenders for mixing the soap batter (no, we dont have big enough muscles), & a computer and printer to run the boring side of the business.  All other processes are done using human energy!

Because Rascal Mountain Soap is handmade, occasionally we get too excited and make too big a batch for our moulds, cut some bars crooked, break a loaf or just make a new recipe which doesnt quite measure up to our exacting standards. We save these wonky peices of perfectly good soap, and use them in our Soapsaver Bags.  These are crocheted by a lovely local lady just up the road in Toowoomba.  Hand crocheted from organic cotton, they can be added to your compost when they finally wear out, to give back life to the earth.

All real soap starts with Lye.  If it doesn't have Lye (or its scientific name, Sodium Hydroxide) on the label, or it doesnt say "Saponified", it's not real soap, it's a synthetic detergent.  (Or they aren't telling you the truth). Lye is a natural ingredient which has been used for centuries.  The very word soap comes from the Latin "Sapo".  Soap is created by the magical reaction that happens when you mix lye and oil.

The first soap was made hundreds of years ago when some oil spilt into the ashes of a cooking fire, creating a substance which people soon discovered would clean things. Although we now use a more refined form of lye than firewood ashes, the art of cold-process soapmaking has remained exactly the same ever since.  We still mix our lye with oil, and let the magic of saponification turn it into soap.

Lye itself isnt a safe substance to bathe in.  In it's original form it's actually caustic.  Even though every real soap begins with lye, there is no lye left in the final product.