Soap socks - taking frugality to the extreme ?

More holidays got into the way of my recycling projects. We spent the winter holidays skiing in Austria and had a great time skiing, cooking, eating, drinking and talking with our friends, who were all there at the same time.

As I mentioned before, I find it very hard to keep up my normal lifestyle when travelling. Recycling systems differ, so I don't know where to get rid of my garbage responsibly. Weekly markets don't normally conincide with our travelling schedule, so I need to shop at supermarkets, where food usually comes in way too much packaging. And most of all, I miss my sewing machine, which I rely on for most of my projects.

So, although I enjoyed our holidays, I am also glad to be back home, and immediately picked up a project, I always wanted to do: I wanted to see, how far I can take frugality with my recycling projects.

About a year ago I have started to use solid shampoo bars, which are much more eco-friendly, since no water gets shipped around the planet unnecessarily as happens with liquid shampoos. At the end of their life, the last sliver of soap tends to break into bits. So over the last few months I have collected about 5 g of broken solid shampoo bits and about 5 g of normal soap. It's not a lot. So is it really worth the effort?

So here is what I did:

1. Cut of the tip of an old stray sock. (Save the rest of the sock for my next blog!!!)
2. Cut or tear two nice fabric ribbons from some old fabric scraps.
3. Fill the soap into the sock and tie shut with the ribbon.
4. Repeat for the solid shampoo with a different ribbon.

This took me about 15 min and I have saved solid shampoo with a value of about € 0,80 (they cost a stunning €8,50 for 55g in the shop!). OK, €3,20 (based on €0,80 saved in 15 min) is a lousy hourly wage even for a designer, but I would still do this again. Now that I have my "soap socks", I just need to add to them, everytime my solid shampoo bar comes to the end of its life.

And wait till you see, how usefull the rest of the sock proofed to be...