Soap making experiment

I saw a great how-to http://www.justcraftyenough.com/2011/11/project-lego-soap/
and I decided to make my own soaps for everyone for Christmas.

Total cost of project under £10 for 10 little bags of soap (and I had plenty of soap base left to make more). This is so easy and fun, it’s definitely going to be a new Christmas tradition round our house now. Also, because it’s soap, it’s easy to clean up afterwards!

I got my soap supplies from soaposh.co.uk. You need:

• Melt and pour soap base
• Colours
• Fragrance (I had some essential oils already)
• Silicone mould
• Cellophane bags (I had these already but you can get them from amazon or ebay for less than £2 for 30)

I chose the SLS free glycerin transparent soap base at £4.29 for 1kg which makes loads of little soaps, but there are also shea butter or goats milk bases and even jelly to choose from.

The colours are 95p each or £7 for eight.

You can buy silicon rubber moulds almost anywhere now – I got mine at the pound shop, I think they were meant for chocolates or ice cubes. You could use the ones meant for cupcakes too.  The soap is really easy to cut with a long knife, so you could also make a bar in a loaf tin and slice it the way they do in LUSH..

Here are all my ingredients:

The first thing you need to do is slice a chunk off your soap base and cut it up into small cubes so it will melt. An easy way to do this is to microwave it – but only for 30-40 seconds, it doesn’t take much to melt it. You don’t want to let it boil, so be careful! I found a little ceramic milk jug was perfect so that I could control the pouring.

When the soap is all melted, you add a few drops of colouring and fragrance, stir them in, and you’re ready to pour into your mould. At this point you could also add glitter or dried flower petals.

Here are my little Christmas shapes in the silicone mould from the pound shop. Now it goes in the fridge for an hour…

And here they are – eight little christmas soaps ready to go into bags (This only used a tiny fraction of my soap base, so I will be making lots more!)