DIY FAIL: Men’s soap gift set

In my many years of searching for DIY tutorials I have never seen someone share their DIY fail experience. If you haven’t either then you’re in luck. I try and fail constantly. It’s like when you’re at your favorite restaurant eating your favorite meal and wondering damn what is their secret sauce/recipe/ingredient. You really want to try to make it yourself at home and it doesn’t come out like how they made it. Yeah that’s how I feel at times.

After trying out soap making for the first time and spending about $30 on materials I wondered if there was a quicker, less expensive way to make good quality soaps. My thing is keep it simple…do what you do with the basics. So thinking basically I need: premade soap and a mold.

My idea for creating this craft was to simply melt down the man soap (the smell of this bar is awesome) and reshaping it into a mustache mold. Then shrink wrapping them individually in a cute little jar with a cool little gift tag. The results weren’t as anticipated.

Ingredients:

Bar of soap

Mustache mold

Glass cup

Spoon

Pot of water

Knife

Shred the soap. Don’t make the mistake I did when I cut the soap in half (this was difficult to do) and try to cut them into cubes. Take your time, be patient and thinly slice the soap. Then put them into the glass cup. Put the cup into the pot and turn on the heat to boil the water.

The method I used was similar to my candle making one where I’d boil a pot of water and place the glass cup in it and watch it melt. It wasn’t happening for the soap shreds. A few minutes passed and nothing. The soap wasn’t melting (not till later did I realize that I was probably drying up the soap not moisturizing it.)

After a few more minutes bubbles started to form which carried the water particles into the cup. Great I thought. Now the water was mixed in there. My friend asked if the water was supposed to be doing that. I answered idk. Then it hit me. Maybe I needed some water to help the soap dissolve. I poured in a little water and guess what it did? The contents of the cup started to bubble. Great! FAIL.

I turned off the pot and took out the cup. Although the mixture was dry there was still some liquid soap in there. I used a spoon to mush what I could and poured it into the mold. There were also small clumps. I put those in the mold too. That wouldn’t hurt I thought. I tossed the rest of the clumpy soap. I waited a few hours and the soaps hadn’t dried yet. Ok I’ll leave it in the freezer overnight and that still didn’t get it into a hard texture…it was still jelloish. So I tossed it and rinsed out the mold.

Boo Hoo. Didn’t work out, but I’ll keep trying. There has to be a way of doing this. Later on I found out its called hand milling aka remolding current soap into a new shape. I’ll work on it and get back to you guys.

This is the type of don't try it at home sort of things :)