Re-using all that excess soap

It may not look pretty but at least I can still use it...

You've formulated, designed, mixed and poured your soap. All went well, no ricing, no acceleration, no mishaps. Great! The waiting begins... A few hours later and its time to unmould and cut, (yaay!). But, on no. The first slice is done and the heart sinks. Your expertly planned design is underwhelming, disappointing even, ok, really disappointing. Bummer.

Now I do have bars which don't quite make the grade, and I'm loathe to 'collect' any more bars of that ilke, (or share them here, heheh). So what to do with all that soap? Well, there are a few options. You could sell them at a discount of course, keep them for home use, or give them away to family and friends, (the soap still functions as soap right?). Or you could rebatch or reuse in some other way.

Why the .... do I have so much soap?!!

 

Soap scraps itching to be re-used

Now it has to be said that not all extra soap left will be down to unsuccessful design. You will probably have soap left over from bevelling or planing, maybe those mica swirled tops just didn't make the grade. Maybe they're so ashed up, so instead of steaming them, you've planed them off. Or perhaps you had a session of over zealous mica or cocoa sieving for a pencil line and your edges are all messy so needed tidying. Maybe that gorgeously bright mica morphed to a vapid shade of 'meh'. Whatever the reason, we soap makers often accumulate excess soap, there's no getting around it. "Got soap?" er, yeah and then some...

Transformation: rebatch or reconstruction*?

Right, you've decided that you'll be transforming your unwanted batch into something new. So what are you going to do? There are two options. Rebatch or reconstruction.

Rebatching
Rebatching is quite the faff, although it has to be said it's a very useful fallback. It can take an age to grate a whole batch of soap, (not to mention the crampy fingers and wrists, unless you have an electric salad shredder), as well as alot of time for mixing, cooking and remixing to break down the pieces of soap. I wont go into it this post, but there are different kinds of rebatching, some quicker than others. I will be posting on rebatching in the near future.

Reconstruction

The other option, I have termed reconstruction. You are going to reconstruct the look of the unwanted soap, by transforming it as a constituent part of another batch of soap. You could chunk it up for an aggregate terrazzo or mosaic tile look...

cubes of three coloured soap embeds...

...used in our Roman tesserae inspired 'Bath House' soap

...or slice into strips for geometric designs, plane for soap curls, or grate it up for confetti embeds....

A load of brightly coloured grated soap shreds...

 ...used as confetti embeds in our 'Party Hearty' soap

Lots of choices. Or, you could grate it and squish it up to make soap balls!

A shreddy designed soap into confetti soap balls

Next week I'll be posting all about just that. Balls aplenty :D . But for now, I'll be raiding my rebatch bucket and planning some more creative soap saves!




* a quick useful term I coined for my notes. Basically re-using a soap as a decorative element in another batch of soap.