What Is Hand Milled Soap?
Hand Milled soapmaking is the fancy way of saying that you take scraps of pre-made soap and melt it down in a liquid. The less fancy way to describe it is “rebatching”. Who rebatches soap? • A cold process soapmaker who has some scraps left over. Rather than throw the scraps out, she may choose to rebatch them into a new bar of soap. • A soapmaker who is working with the book The Complete Soapmaker by Norma Cooney or Beautiful Handmade Soaps by Browning. • A soapmaker who wants to make a completely and truly natural bar of soap but doesn’t want to work with lye. While the concept is simple, rebatching soap is actually difficult enough that many soapmakers refuse to do it. The main problem is that no soap base is 100% the same batch to batch. Even if made from the same recipe, each batch will have a slightly different moisture content, will be slightly more or less alkaline, etc. So, becoming a successful re-batching soapmaker requires practice! Over time, the diligent soapmaker will de
