Kelli, here is a country woman making soap

I found this photo in an old Country magazine and I decided to post it for Kelli, who writes Thoughts of a Sober White Women, because she has been talking about making soap as an ecco friendly thing to do. This reminded me so much of our days of makng soap in the country out of animal fat and lye, water, etc. We used beef suet quite a bit because we did not make lard out of it as we did with pig fat. We would be tending the fire and stirring now and then until it set up, and then we would leave it over night and the next day we would cut it up in chunks leaving this caustic jelly we would have to find some place to pour out, as it would burn a place in the grass, but did not really do a lot of harm.
This was just one more big old task I would help with. My dad would not buy laundry soap out of the store ever. The only thing he agreed to buy willingly was pork and beans for camping out. Maybe a little can of vienna sausage once in a while. He had been raised to be very frugal like his Mom. He would have highly approved of you, Kelli, with your quilt making. My mom wanted to leave behind country ways which is why they never got along I suppose. She thought that if she went to all the trouble of building a country store and stocking it, she should be able to live out of it. She refused to make bread any more, so our dad recruited us girls to make his home made bread. He loved nothing more than warm bread, butter we churned ourselves, and home made jam we bottled in the summer out of a number of different fruits. He was ecco friendly like Kelli and didn't even know it!