Nothing says refreshing like licking a bar of soap after an hour on a trampoline!

One of the items that I received as a freebie to try and review from Influenster's MomVoxBox was Ivory's classic bar soap.  I hadn't used a bar of Ivory soap to wash myself with in years, though my current bottle of body wash is Ivory.  I love the smell of it, and wanted to see how the bar soap compared, as it's extremely inexpensive to buy it that way. In fact, it's one of the cheapest bar soaps you can buy.



My eleven year old daughter apparently has no experience with bar soaps.  What can I say, this is a body wash type of house.  She was completely amazed by the fact that it floats.  So amazed, in fact, that she decided to look online to see what else it can do.

When I buy Ivory bar soap, I buy it for the purpose of making laundry detergent.  It works wonderfully, smells good, and is great for people who are sensitive to laundry products.  To make the detergent, I grate a bar of Ivory, and melt it in a pot of water (about six cups or so) on the stove.  Then I add 1/2 cup of washing soda  (this is NOT baking soda - BAD THINGS will happen if you confuse the two) and 1/2 cup of borax and stir until it's all mixed together.  If you want to be fancy, you can add fragrance to it, but make sure you don't add anything that will stain.  I love using lime essential oil in mine.  Mix this up with a gallon of water (I reuse an old gimongous laundry detergent bottle) and let sit overnight.  If it looks kinda watery, that's OK.  It's also a low-sudsing detergent, which is what I've been told you need to use in an HE-washer.  I don't have one of those.  I'm not fancy enough.  Because Ivory is know for its purity, this is a fantastic laundry soap for those with newborns (and again, those who are sensitive to laundry products).

This time, however, I was circumvented by Mog spotting a video on what happens when you microwave Ivory.  You see, when you microwave Ivory, the very air bubbles that make it float in water expand, making the soap grow bigger.  She assures me that this was way cool. In fact, the entire household (including visiting guests) crowded around the microwave to watch it grow.

Honestly, though, microwaving Ivory soap is a really lazy way of grating the soap, as the expansion causes it to create a hard foam that crumbles really easily.  The resulting powder can be used in a lot of ways.  Mog decided that she needed to add food coloring to hers and used it as a powdered bubble bath.  It didn't really foam up a whole a lot (most powdered bubble baths don't), but she still loved bathing with it.  She's already asked if we can get some more.  Personally, I'll be sticking with my Ivory body wash (love it!), but who can deny a kid begging for some soap?