Feb. 23, 2007 - Fancy French Soap School Project
When we were "visiting" France in our school lessons, one of our projects was to make soap by using old soap slivers, melting them down, and forming them into new soap bars. Unfortunately it was not as easy as it sounded. The first batch we tried in the microwave. That did not turn out so well. It was nice and soft as soon as it came out of the microwave, but then it would not soften any further. Here is what it looked like:
We stopped at that moment and went to the internet. Have I ever mentioned how I love Google?  I used one site that had great information about soap making. I wish I had saved it. First, it suggested putting the soap pieces through the food processer and shred them as if it was cheese. Next, it suggested to put it into a double boiler (I don't have one, so we used double pots instead), and add a little oil to the soap shreds. The third suggestion was to add a bit of milk if needed.  Who would have thought of that? Milk!! Well, we followed the instructions by shredding our soap by using our food processor. We put it into a small pot and set it into a larger pot full of boiling water. Here is a picture of our soap in shreds, just put into the pot:
After the soap was softened just a bit into the pot, we added about a Tablespoon of oil to the soap shreds. It softened up a bit further, but not until we added a Tablespoon of milk, did it really soften. It was amazing! It transformed into a soft, mushy mass of soap!! At that point we added oatmeal to our cream colored soap, poppy seeds to our pink soap, and herbs to our green soap.
After all that work, and mess....we were able to do the fun part. We sprayed down waxed paper with Pam, and used cookie cutters, playdoh molds, and our hands to make the shapes we wanted. Here is our final product. What an experiment! Fortuanately, it was very easy to clean up...after all it was soap!! It was probably the cleanest mess we ever made. Ha ha...okay enough of my dry humor!!
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