Felted Soap

I make soap. I sell my soap. But mostly I use my soap. I love it. My skin is no longer itchy in the winter and I don't have to use sticky lotion to get it that way. I will show you in a future post how I make my soap, but this post is about how I use wool to felt the soap. This makes it easier to hold onto, helps it last longer, and gives it a mildly abrasive surface for exfoliating and scrubbing.

A friend of mine has alpacas. I used her alpaca hair and a fluff of wool to compare how they felted. The brown is the natural alpaca fur and the green is the wool.

 

Here is my bar of soap.

 

Next, I took a few strands of the wool/ fur and wrapped it around the soap in one direction.

 

  Then a few more wrapped in the other direction.

 

And again in the first direction.

 

Now you are ready. Take the wrapped soap and put it in the end of a pair of pantyhose. I cut the foot out and used that or you could use a knee high one. This isn't necessary to use, but it makes it easier to hold onto the soap and to keep the wool in place.

 

Wet the soap.

 

Now just rub your bar in all directions, rolling it. You are using friction to felt it, so make sure to go back and forth in all directions and end to end.

After a few minutes, you can remove it from the stocking. If it looks like this, you can put it back in and rub some more or call it good. It will continue to felt as it's used and will shrink to fit the bar as the bar shrinks. 

 

 And there you have it, felted soap. In my comparison, I found that the alpaca fur actually felted more quickly and easily.