Our school holiday shopping list looked like this:

Shea butter

Olive oil

Sweet almond oil

Coconut oil

Castor oil

Lye, otherwise known as caustic soda, which sounds plain awful at best and positively dangerous at worst! (Bearing in mind, my cleaning kit comprises only vinegar and a steam mop.)

Essential oils

Poppy seeds

Activated charcoal

Lavender

Rosemary

Silicone moulds

Blood, sweat and tears (incurred from the multiple shopping trips alone)

Plain chips (entirely unrelated to the soap recipe)

Anyone trying to think of stuff to do indoors with kids during the smoky school holidays will know where I'm coming from.

We went to two chemists and three hardware stores in two states to track down lye this month. Two outlets wanted to know what we were doing with it before telling us they didn't have it in stock. I'm not sure what could be more wholesome than making soap. It's good, clean fun, right?!

Turned out shea butter cost a small fortune as it was sold in only minute amounts on the Border.

We headed to our standby Wodonga shop, Replenish Store, but its ceiling had caved in, putting it temporarily out of action.

When I suggested to my oldest we leave out the shea butter, I learnt that shea butter was the whole point of soap.

"It's like baking; you wouldn't leave out the flour or the almond meal or it would be a wet mess."

No shea butter. No soap.

Desperate to get the soap-making show on the road, I footed the bill for a tiny tub of shea butter, which was enough for three batches of soap.

Once back home, we realised we didn't have the activated charcoal for the charcoal soap.

Again, this was kind of a crucial ingredient!

As my daughters wanted to sell the charcoal soap to raise some money for the Red Cross Disaster Response and Recovery Fund, the inconvenience of one more trip to the pharmacy, really paled into insignificance!

Then I suited up to handle the "lye" part of the exercise while my daughters took care of the measuring, melting, mixing, moulding and messing around.

We soon found that charcoal soap in the shape of a cube looked seriously like a lump of coal.

We agreed this would be a hard sell (even for a marketing maestro like the Prime Minister Scott Morrison), especially in the current climate!

With a flying trip to the catering shop, we soon had charcoal soap in the shape of a sphere.

Incidentally, we also had charcoal soap on every kitchen, bathroom and laundry surface.

It was like the Great Slime Craze Phase of 2018 come back but this time, stronger, in black.

Admittedly, the soap is much more moisturising than slime and does far less damage to carpets.

Having found out that soap takes three weeks to cure, we had plenty of time to tally the cost.

I felt like we must be nudging the $100-a-bar mark to break even.

However, my daughters (who are both better at maths than me) say it worked out to be more like $5 a piece for their organic soap.

With lessons in finding recipes, researching products, sourcing ingredients, adding up and marketing, we've probably come out just in front.

Then fingers crossed, in a few weeks, they'll be able to clean up for the Red Cross.