Soap—Odds and Ends.—There are several useful ways of disposing of soap scraps. Dry them out thorough ly on tins in a warm oven, run them through a meat chopper (which can, of course, be easily cleaned after wards), pound to a powder, mix with bran or oatmeal, and place in small cheese-cloth bags for the bath.
Or, when the scraps have accumu lated, boil them with water until they melt and thicken. Use just enough water to keep them from burning. Pour into small molds like can covers, and allow them to harden. These give you new cakes of soap.
Or make a jelly of bits of fine white soap by melting a cupful of broken bits in a pint of hot water. Or run the soap through a meat cutter, or shave fine and melt with gentle heat. The soap will jell when cold. This soap jelly is useful in washing deli cate fabrics, as silks, laces, and rib bons, and also for the toilet.
Or take a small spice can, fit a round stick of wood inside to keep the can in shape, and perforate the bottom and top by driving nails through the can into the wood. Put soap scraps in this and use as a soap shaker in washing dishes.
Uses of Soap.—Common yellow soap will Stop a mouse hole effectually.
Make bureau drawers and windows which are inclined to stick work smoothly.
Take the pain from a burn.
Cut up fine (a quarter of a bar) and dissolved in strong, hot borax water, clean plated silverware. Let soak two or three hours in the solu tion, and little rubbing will be needed.
Combined with brown sugar, bring painful swellings to a head, and will draw out a splinter from under the nail.
Rubbed on a nail, prevent the wood through which it is driven from split ting. It is often used by carpenters, who drive the nail through the bar of soap before using.
Mixed with stove blacking, lessen the labor of applying and improve re sult.
Stop a leak in a boiler in emergency cases.
Quickly remove the odor of perspi ration.
Serve as a substitute for wax to point darning yarn.
The inner wrappers are useful to clean flatirons.
Use Plenty of Each. — A bar of laundry soap, valued at five cents for the best, saved at the expense of an hour of the laundress's time, value eighteen cents, to say nothing of the wear and tear on clothes occasioned by the extra rubbing, is extravagance.