This is Part 2 in a short series on how I plan to salvage a batch of soft lilac soap. You can get yourself caught up on Part 1 if you need to.

Today I made a small batch of soap with the soap shreds embedded in it to see how it would work. Using my nine-bar recipe, I measured everything out, with the soap shreds as one quarter of the weight. I am very grateful for all the suggestions that were given on how to make those soap shreds less sticky! There were lots of great ideas, and any one of them would have worked, but I decided to go with cornstarch since that’s what was on hand.

So, after adding four teaspoons of cornstarch to 11 ounces of soap shreds, it looked like this:

(Disclaimer: I didn’t take the time to get a correct white balance setting on my camera, and I don’t know how to use Photoshop well enough to fix the photos, so they will look a bit yellow.) Since the shreds are mostly white, I figured a nice purple soap base would look great with the white specks in it. After pulling out a half cup of the white soap to swirl into the top, I added the purple colorant and some lilac fragrance.

Once the soap base was well-mixed, I stirred in the soap shreds. Their volume seemed almost equal to the soap base!

Here’s how it looked all stirred together, and in the mold:

Then I poured the remaining white soap on top and poked around a bit with a wooden skewer. The purple soap was setting up already, and the white soap was still at a light trace, so they didn’t want to mix very well. I think the overall effect will be nice though. Especially with more glitter on top!

Tomorrow we’ll see what it looks like when it’s cut. I have a good feeling about this, and am believing that I will be able to make a full-sized batch with the rest of the soap shreds next week!