Felted Soap

I was invited by my friend, Barb Stainman, to come to her studio for a few hours and make some felted soap.  Felted Soap?  How does the bar of soap get into that felted fabric?  Intrigued, I jumped on the chance to learn something new.

I have felted before (both by machine and by hand) and found the process to be long, strenuous and hard on my hands and shoulders but felting soap turned out to be fun and easy.  The felting process combines wool roving, soap and hot water, plus a lot of manipulation to make the wool fibers stick together so felting soap is a perfect combination.  The nice thing about using felted soap is that it acts like a wash cloth in that it exfoliates the skin while washing.  Ingenious!  And, you can color coordinate your soap with the color scheme of your bathroom.  Very cool.

Here are the two bars I made in about 45 minutes.  I'll be gifting these to my daughter-in-law and teaching my granddaughter and grandson how to make these as Christmas gifts for their teachers.  I always bring some sort of art project for the kids when we visit them.  It gets them away from their tablets and phones — which is a good thing!

Barb will be selling some of her work at the Holiday Show at the Art Gym in Denver (November 29 - December 20th).  I have my eye on a Nuno scarf she made (gorgeous!) so I know there will be lots of goodies there to give as gifts this season.  We always need to support local artists and this is a good time of year to do so!