Last week, TL acquainted you with the perils of remilling homemade soap. In that article, she mentions that ‘tallow’ soap is easier to rebatch. Well guess what’s the first ingredient in Ivory Soap? Sodium Tallowate. Which mean saponified (soapified, tee-hee) TALLOW!

So, this is for all ya’ll who thought my soap wrapping post betrayed a secret knowledge of store-bought rebatching.

Ivory’s Remilled Ivory

Ivory soap
Water
Additives (~1 tsp oil/8 oz soap)
Microwave

1. Grate soap into a microwave safe bowl. Dampen soap with water. Microwave for three minutes, or until it starts to foam up.

2. Scrape bowl and press it back down to the bottom of the bowl. (Stirring induces more bubbling over. Scoop and smoosh is MUCH better.) Dampen again. And nuke for another minute, or until it starts to foam.

3. Repeat step two until it goes ‘clear gel’ on you and looks a lot like that vaseline intensive lip stuff that came in the squishy tubes from the drug store. Thinner than vaseline, but nothing anyone would accuse of being an actual ‘liquid.’ (BTW, you can’t really over cook this. I did step 2 for about 20 minutes, trying to get it to go liquidy for me.)

4. Stir in your additives and “pour” (read: SPOON in clear stringy blobs) into your mold. I used the bottom and top thirds of a quart soy milk container. Bang and squish it a bunch to get out the air bubbles.

5. Unmold, slice, and let it dry out for a few WEEKS. Early it has that ‘gummy eraser’ spring to it that hot process has. But after a while, it should harden up.

BTW, that’s lavender bits on the right.