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Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Felted Soap - I Found it on Pinterest

I have thoroughly been enjoying Pinterest for many months now.  I've been seriously inspired and I've learned things I may have not known I wanted to learn.  I spend the last hour or so before I go to sleep every night checking my favorite boards, it relaxes me and I enjoy seeing what others find interesting.

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!!  
Overall it was a fun experience and I encourage you to try it!  Don't be afraid of messing up, it's soap and wool, you can't really ruin it.  Come back and let me know how it went for you!

2 comments:

Rachel Tayse said...

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.

Chrissy Joy said...

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.