So I had this huge box of soap scraps and batches that didn’t turn out for whatever reason that was sitting in my dining room. In the past, I’ve donated to Clean the World, but I waited too long this time and the shipping was going to be over $50. So, I’ve been making rebatch soaps with the scraps as I have time, and donating them to local homeless ministries.

Yesterday I decided that I could maximize my time a little better by doing some prep work – that is, getting all of the soaps shredded or chunked, weighed, and ready to melt down ahead of time. I wish I would have taken a photo of my kitchen as I was doing this prep work. There was soap EVERYWHERE. I was using my food processor to shred some of the full-sized bars, pulling out all the end pieces, and separating out the tan/brown soaps from the colored soaps. Piles of soap. The ones that were too small to shred, I put in the processor with the blade and just chopped them into smaller bits of soap. I only stalled out the motor a handful of times…

Here is the fruit of my labor:

The beauty of it is that this morning I was able to pull out a 2 lb. bag of soap (that had been #10) and melt it in the crockpot on high with 1/3 cup of water, stirring every 30-60 minutes, throwing in an 8 oz. bag of colored soap chunks (would have been #7) with a small sample bottle of fragrance at the end, and coming up with this beauty in just a couple of hours:

Here are some soaps I made previously:

So much fun!! No two batches are alike, and they all go to a great cause. It should be easy to get one made every day…