Soap Lily: Who ya gonna call? Ghostbusters! We have their green slime.

Wednesday September 24, 2014

I am writing this on the 24th. We've finished the rebatch and I know how it looks, but since we started this process on the 23rd I thought I'd give credit to what we accomplished yesterday as well as today. Are you confused? I am! Essentially, we started grating the soap on Monday, and finished grating yesterday. Today we rebatched it.

First, a disclaimer!

The soap we rebatched today resembles many things. Alison and I were laughing out loud, really - LOL. We both have kids and have suffered through cleaning up horrid diapers, being thrown up on and, well, you get it, the dark side (so to speak) of having kids. So we are preparing you. Some of the following pictures look like the Ghost Busters team squirted green slime into our mold, or it might also look like the remains of said horrid diaper....

HOWEVER, having fully prepared you for how it looks, we are so, so happy with how it smells (out of this world). We think the vivid olive green color will fade a bit and it will be fine, but please remember, we warned you.

Basically here's the deal - we have a few soaps that look fine, but their scents have almost disappeared. With the lack of scent, (and face it, for many people soap is ALL about scent) we doubt they will sell. To keep our soap stock fresh-looking (and smelling) we decided to rebatch two of our soaps.

We made our plans to grind up the soap, add additional water and fragrance, cook it until it's goopy, and put it into a mold to reinvent it (think new name).

In the olden days if people wanted to grate their unused soap, it might take forever to grate it finely by hand. We are lucky to be modern women. We used a Cuisinart starting with the larger grating disc then moving on to the smaller one. The smaller disc was better as it left the grated soap in tiny slivers that melted faster. We had 18 bars of soap grated in no time.

The wrapper from Lemon and Lavender, we grated 8 of these bars.

This soap smelled great when we first made it, however it really faded with time. Interestingly, though, when we cut into it, the fragrance was very strong again. We read that sometimes as soaps sit, the fragrance can fade from the outer layer but is still present inside. Perhaps that is what we were experiencing with these soaps.

We used the larger grating disc for Lemon and Lavender.

Springtime is the other soap we added to this re batch. Once again, the scent was great at first then faded away. We ground up 10 of these bars.

We grated Springtime with the smaller disc. It made much finer flakes of soap that melted faster than the Lemon and Lavender ones.

It took a little over an hour to grate the 18 bars of soap.

We wound up with this giant bag of soap flakes that is obviously too big for the crock pot.

We had about six pounds of grated soap! We figured it would take forever if we put it all in the boiling bag (heatproof turkey roasting bag).

So....

Putting the soap into the pot of simmering water.

We divided the batch in two. Half stayed in the boiling bag, and the other half went into the crock pot. This will be a good way to see which way works best.

There are several different methods for rebatching soap: double boiler, crock pot, turkey roaster, oven, or microwave. We decided split the difference and use the crock pot & our version of the "double boiler" using the boiling bag.

Another point in the rebatch debate is the amount of liquid needed. After watching countless Youtube videos on rebatching and reading everything we could find, we settled on adding 1/2 cup of distilled water to each batch, stirring it in and letting it cook.

We checked the soap every 20 minutes. The picture above is what the crock pot batch looked like after 40 minutes of cooking on low.

After 40 minutes the boiling bag was melting much faster than the crock pot batch.

This is crock pot batch after an hour; it is still somewhat lumpy,

but it's coming along - slowly.

After an hour, the boiling bag batch was clearly in the lead. The soap flakes melted into a much looser batter than the flakes in the crock pot.

After 1 hour and 20 minutes the boiling bag was so far ahead of the crock pot that we

decided to ditch the crock pot and combine the two batches in the boiling bag. This

was a great idea. After 20 more minutes of cooking, mushing, prodding,

mixing etc., we decided that the mixture was done.

To beef up the scent we added one ounce each of these two scents from +Bramble Berry. They both are wonderful, and the combination is outstanding. The added scent is layered on top of the original scents, which both batches already contained.

We know.

It looks awful. But don't judge the soap by this photo!

This is the bag of melted soap flakes after we had added and mixed in the fragrance oils.

No comments please (even though we couldn't help ourselves).

We know this looks gross, but it's the best way for us to get the melted flakes out of the bag. We cut a corner off and squeezed the batter through the hole like frosting from a pastry bag.

Really, we know. It does look gross.

Does it help to tell you that it smells really nice?

Squeezing the batter out is harder than it looks; it is stiff and really HOT. Remember, it had been cooking in boiling water for 1 -1/2 hours!

Alison is scraping every last bit out of the bag.

Here is the rebatched soap in the mold. There are tiny flakes of the original soaps here and there that give the re batched bars a terrazzo floor look.

In go the dividers. Out of 18 bars of soap we grated/chopped up, we got 18 new, super smelling, refurbished bars of soap.

What is left of the boiling bag. Alison did a great job scraping.

(Why, thank you, Kathy!)

We left the soap in the mold to cool and harden for 24 hours, and on Thursday morning we took them out and admired our thriftiness and handiwork.

Above is a close-up of one of the re-batched bars of Lavender Lemon Cake soap. See the embedded flakes of color? We think it looks as nice as it smells!

Group shot!