Many months ago, I came across a felted soap tutorial by the Frugal Kiwi. I had recently started needle felting, and dabbled in a little bit of wet felting when making small wool balls.
I pinned the tutorial and kept it in mind for a day when I was looking for a new challenge. Well I finally got around to it and I wanted to share my results with you.
The idea of felted soaps is appealing to me as a fun project, and something practical to give away as gifts. The wool makes a great lather, and keeps the soap from being too slippery so you can use the entire bar. I had set aside two bars of soap especially for this project, the large bar is just a generic store brand bar of bath soap. The smaller one is a sample from Tom's of Maine that came with my favorite deodorant. The tutorial is very thorough and I encourage you to go over and check it out, as I won't be sharing the process here.
What I do want to share is some of the problems I encountered on my first tries:
- I was trying to be sparing in the wool that I used, even knowing that it would shrink as it was felted, and as you can see I did not cover the entire bar. So next time I'll use more wool!
- I was not prepared for the amount of suds that this project would create. I originally started off with a bowl of hot water so I could sit down for the process. However I soon had to move to the bathroom sink as there were suds everywhere!!
2 comments:
Last Christmas I was gifted a bar of felted soap and I loved it - easier to pick up and use than a regular bar and the felt adds some exfoliation power. I experimented with felting soap myself and made the same stingy mistake. More felt = better.
I will share a warning. That gift soap turned into a curse when I exposed myself to poison ivy and used the bar to wash off. The poison oil stayed on the felt and I re-exposed and spread the itch. So yea, don't use a felted soap to wash off poison ivy.
Oh man I never would have thought of that, I've never had poison ivy but the husband does get it occasionally.
I'm excited about trying it again with more wool.
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