Living Like Little House on the Prairie ~ Being Creative

As we start reading farther into Little House on the Prairie we read about the Ingalls starting to set up their house. They needed to create a house out of pretty much nothing on the prairie. The prairie isn't the most insipring place. It's flat...and that's about it. I can hardly imagine trying to start from scratch in the middle of an endless prairie over 100 years ago. You would just have to learn to be creative and inventive to get your home going!

"Pa was on top of the walls, stretching the canvas wagon-top over the skeleton roof of saplings. The canvas billowed in the wind, Pa's beard blew wildly and his hair stood up from his head as if it were trying to pull itself out. He held onto the canvas and fought it. Once it jerked so hard that Laura thought he must let go or sail into the air like a bird. But he held tight to the wall with his legs, and tight to the canvas with his hands, and he tied it down." ~ Little House on the Prairie p. 72-73

In this part of the book Pa had built the house but at the time he couldn't build the roof because he needed extra help. So he put the wagon canvas for the roof of the little house. In the last few weeks I've been thinking about being creative and using something you already have to create something that you need.

In the last year I've had to take several trips for business and other various reasons. In that time I've stayed at alot of hotels and collected alot of freebie soap bars. Now unless it's a really nice natural soap like Badlands Soap I'm not much of a soap bar user. I don't like the smell and I don't like the sticky sliminess. But then it hit me, why can't I make those soap bars into liquid soap? It's something we use everyday.

I dug out all the soap bars that I could find in my bathroom and came up with 8 of them.

I used an old cheese grater and grated up the soap bars. After a while I got sick of it and just started breaking them into chunks. I don't recommend this unless you want to wait several days for the soap to be done.

Put all the soap chunks in an old container. For my 8 travel size bars I had to use 2 large cottage cheese containers.

Then add hot water to the container until it covers the soap. Stir. Over the next couple hours or possibly days depending on the size of your soap chunks. Everytime you remember, mix the soap around and mash it up a little. When the water gets used up and the soap mixture starts to get really thick, add more hot water and stir it around.

Just keep doing this until you have a perfect paste that you can add to a empty soap dispenser. It's such a simple way to take something that I wasn't using and turn it into something we can use! I also added a little essential oil to the mixture to make the scent better.

Make sure you check out the entire Living Like Little House series!