Soap Felting

So you are probably asking what is felted soap?  Think a nice handmade shea butter soap encased in 

its own washcloth which will give you a nice mild exfoliation all over the body.  When the soap is 

used up you are left with the small wool felted case which you can save for your soap slivers!

My stock of wool roving has lots of colors to play with--I got it from Kitty at Kangaroo Blue when she was clearing out her personal stash.  I don't have the labels on all of the packages, but, it mostly appears to be Corridale-Romney X blended with Angora wool.  The dyes are vibrant and gorgeous.  The pictures are not great...it was hard holding the camera with sudsy hands!

This is 1/2 ounce of the cream, berry and purple roving that will be felted on my 

Season's Scent Christmas soap for 2011.  

This is the soap once all the roving is wrapped to cover all the edges.

Then it is placed carefully in a nylon stocking and hot water is slowly introduced.

I am squeezing the bar and making sure to hit all the sides of the bar of soap to get 

the "fluffiness" out of the roving.  The water slowly permeates the roving and comes 

in contact with the soap and you start to get suds.

Once the roving is tighter and most of the looseness is gone, I slipped it out of the nylon.

I continued to rub the soap at this stage rotating it every way 

possible to keep all the fibers meshing together.

Once it is all snug, I rinsed it in hot water and then finished it off with cold water trying to 

squeeze all the water and suds out of the felted soap.  How does the finished bar look?  

My next batch was dark brown, light blue and cream.

The soap before it went in the nylon.

The final batch was berry and grey.  

My first three bars. What do you think?  What's your favorite combination.  

Any color combo suggestions?   The benefit is that my hands feel oh 

so silky and smooth after all that rubbing.  I think I will look for a 

felting mat at the craft store tomorrow.  I wonder if it would help the 

fuzzy look of the darker fibers on the lighter?  And I wish the grey 

fibers on the berry soap would have stayed where I put them!