Saving Soap!
As part of our eco mission we ditched bottled hand wash a long time ago in favour of bars of soap. This has been one of the easiest swaps ever, but it does have one drawback. When the soap gets too small to use it means wasting some, they occasionally snap and sometimes they just start looking plain awful after a while (have you ever been in a public loo with a bar of soap that you're convinced would add dirt to your hands rather than remove it? Well, like that but obviously not as bad haha). Here I show a solution to all those problems.
Here is (almost) everything you'll need. Your soap scraps (this has taken us at least a year to accumulate. I keep them in a small pot on top of my microwave while I'm saving them up), a brain marie setup so a saucepan and Pyrex mixing bowl which fits inside as shown, a grater and (not pictured) some moulds for putting your soap into at the end.
The moulds i used.
First grate your scraps of soap into your mixing bowl.
Add water to the grated soap so that it is just covered. Give it all a good mix and you'll see that the mixture already starts to combine as shown.
Put some water into the saucepan below the mixing bowl, making sure it is not so much that the water touches the mixing bowl. Boil the water and stir the soap mixture regularly.
As you mix your soap should start to look something like this. There are still a lot of pieces at the moment within the mixture.
You will be able to pick up your soap on your mixing spoon as shown.
Keep heating and mixing the mixture until you have melted most or all of the small pieces. How long this takes will depend on how fussy you are about the pieces. I quite liked the look of the different colours speckled through the mix so I didn't worry too much about a few bits. I could have melted more of them if I had heated the mixture for longer.
Spoon your mixture into your moulds as shown. Work it into the base as much as possible to minimise any air gaps in the finished product.
Add more mixture and keep pushing it into the mould and smoothing it over until it looks something like this.
Repeat until you have used all of your mixture.
Leave to set for a couple of hours and then pop the soaps out of the moulds. There you have it! 3 large home made looking soaps from scraps which would have otherwise ended up in the bin. Kind to the planet, kind on the wallet and honestly, quite satisfying!
Comments
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I like your idea. I being an older generation woman have done almost the same thing . I grate my bars but instead of remolding them I just refill my handsoap dispenser and add a bit of hot tap to melt the shavings and shake to mix. Or use them in a pinch to wash clothes in washer.works great either way. So happy to see the young doing these things.
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Or you could use a candy mold and make individual soap molds for company.
Frequently asked questions
Have a question about this project?
Can you put this in a brownie bar pan to have a more soap feel and do what Doty suggests.