Soft soap works just as well as hard and for these reasons the colonists, making their own soap, did not make hard soap bars. In towns and cities where there were soap makers making soap for sale, the soap could be converted to the hard soap by the addition of salt. As hard bars it will be easier to store and transport. Hard bars produced by the soap maker were often scented with oils such as lavender, wintergreen, or caraway and were sold as toilet soap to persons living in the cities or towns. Hard soap is not cut into small bars and wrapped as has been familiar.
Soap made by the soap makers is poured into large wooden frames and removed when cooled and hard.
The amount of soap a customer wants can be cut from the large bar. Soap is sold usually by the pound. The hardest part is in determining if the lye is of the correct strength, as we have said. In order to learn this, the soap maker floats either a potato or an egg in the lye. If the object floats with a specified amount of its surface above the lye solution, the lye is declared fit for soap making.