I made this crayons soap using a silicone molding putty to make the custom crayon mold.

I suggest removing the paper first, which I knew I should have done, but for some reason didn’t.  Here’s why.

The paper came out of my mold easily enough using rubbing alcohol, and I went on to make a variety of soap crayons.

I made the yellow one last.  It came out the most realistic because I used more colorant.  If I were to do this again, I would make all of the crayons like that.

Make sure to use non-bleeding colorants for this project, or else the crayons will bleed into the rest of the soap.

Pour a layer of clear soap (fragranced, if desired) into your mold.  Spritz the crayons with alcohol and place them into the clear soap.  Allow to set.

Use white melt and pour base, or add titanium dioxide to clear base, for the final layer (fragranced, if desired).  Be sure to spray the first layer with alcohol before pouring the white layer.

Allow to fully harden and pop out your crayons soap.  What a cute gift for your favorite teacher, or a great way to get your students or children to wash their hands.

You could get creative with this project and make a yellow box of crayons soap with a clear soap “window” that you can see the crayons through.

If you have read any of my soap making (and other bath and body products) projects and tutorials, you should know that I always use Bramble Berry products.  As you can see here, here, here, and here, to name only a few, I love Bramble Berry’s fragrances and colorants.

My favorite product, though, has to be their melt and pour soap base, only because it is the best I have ever used.  I have customers that like it better than my cold process soap!

But, I could never pick just one product because I love them all!  And hopefully, they will pick me to sample some of their new fragrances and give my opinion as part of the SOAP panel.

You’ll also be happy to hear that I made a new “back to school” soap project – using Bramble Berry products, of course – that I will post this weekend.

The recipe calls for using your favorite basic soap recipe and substituting double strength coffee for the water in the lye solution, then adding some dried used coffee grounds.

Simple enough, I thought.

Well, simple enough it was.  I did not have any problems making the soap.  However, the coffee and lye solution stinks like nothing I have ever smelled before!  It was disgusting.  The gross smell does go away and there is no trace of it left in the soap, but it was bad enough that I will probably not ever make it again.

I am glad that I tried it, though.  The soap is very nice.  The only thing I dislike is that the coffee grounds are very exfoliating and can even be a bit scratchy on my sensitive skin.  It makes a wonderful men’s soap, though.  Or a foot scrubbing bar.

The light brown color is the natural color and I used a little bit of cappuccino mica to make the swirl on top.

The other day, I set out to make a great loaf of multi-layered soap. I carefully melted, scented, colored, and poured each layer. I gently textured the top as it hardened. I patiently waited until the next day so the soap would be fully set before I unmolded it.

And here’s what happened to my bars of soap:

The reason was that the soap I used for the yellow and green layers was remelted from another project and the soap I used for the pink and white layers was a freshly opened 1 lb. bar.

Let this be a lesson: Always use the same base for multi-layer pours to ensure better adhesion.

Not the type to give up (or waste three pounds of soap!), I came up with another idea.

First, I melted a pound of clear glycerin soap in my handy crock pot.

Then, I cut my split loaf into cubes.

Next, I scented the clear soap (with the same fragrance oil as the other soap).

I poured a small layer of clear into a silicone loaf pan, sprayed it with alcohol, took a handful of cubes, sprayed them with alcohol, and put them into the loaf pan, adding more clear soap over the top and spraying with more alcohol.

(The alcohol helps the solid soap adhere and it pops the air bubbles on the top of the melted soap.)

After that set, I repeated the process, first spraying the set layer with alcohol.

Here is my final loaf.

I cut it into large 4 oz. body bars and half-sized 2 oz. hand soap bars.

The thing about this loaf is that it is free form.  You can place the lemon slices any way you want.  You can make the meringue layer taller or shorter.  I hate to pin down numbers, but a tutorial needs numbers, so here are the numbers from my latest batch, along with some other things you’ll need.

35 oz (weight) clear melt and pour base

16 oz (weight) white melt and pour base, such as goat milk

Six cavity silicon muffin pan

Loaf mold (40 oz. size)

Hello Sweet Thang! fragrance oil or other sweet lemon fragrance

Yellow mica

Spray bottle filled with alcohol

Basic soap-making gear

Melt 5 oz. of clear base and color with two heaping .15 cc mini scoops of yellow mica (~1/8 teaspoon).  Evenly divide into the 6 cavities of the silicone muffin pan and spray with alcohol to remove any bubbles.  Set aside to fully harden.

Once the lemons are hard, melt 14 oz. of clear base and add fragrance.  You do not need to color this soap because the yellow from the lemon slices will bleed into it, giving it a touch of color.  (The amount of fragrance you use is a personal preference.  I don’t like a strong fragrance, so I am not listing the amounts I used.  Your fragrance oil vendor should have a recommended usage rate.)  Pour a thin layer of soap into the loaf mold and spray with alcohol to remove the bubbles.  Cool long enough to allow a skin to form.  While you are waiting, cut your yellow circles in half to make your lemon wedges.

You are now going to place 6 lemon slices in the loaf.  Spray the clear soap layer and the slices liberally with alcohol and push the lemon slices into the soap, as pictured.  Do not worry about the wrinkles in the soap.

Once the slices are arranged, spray again and pour the remaining melted soap into your loaf mold, being careful not to knock the slices over.  If you do, try to stand them back up.  If they don’t stand up, that’s okay too.  Your soap will look fine.  Spray the top with alcohol to remove any bubbles.  Allow to cool.

(See, no more wrinkles!)

Melt the remaining 16 oz of clear base and fragrance it.  Allow to cool slightly.  (Too hot soap will melt the lemon slices.)  Position the remaining 6 slices in the loaf, this time with the flat side up.  Remember to spray all soap surfaces with alcohol for good adhesion of layers.  Pour the melted soap into the mold.  Spray the top to get rid of any bubbles.

After the loaf has hardened enough to hold the layer of white soap (it can still be soft in the middle), melt the 16 oz of white soap base and add fragrance.  Allow to cool, stirring occasionally, until it starts to get thick.  Spray the loaf with alcohol and pour the white soap on top.  Continue to stir, swirl, or pat the soap with the back of a spoon, until meringue-like peaks form.

Allow to harden completely.  Remove from mold.  Slice and enjoy!

I wanted to tell you about this before the special $12 price ends. Friday is the last day, then it goes up to $15.

Head on over and check out the new issue. While you’re there, poke around her site – it’s really something!

Cold process soap making involves mixing oils with a lye and water solution. The resulting chemical reaction, called saponification, creates soap.  There is no lye left in the soap when the saponification is complete.

Lye is a caustic substance – ie it can burn you – so there are some safety rules you should follow.

Before you start making soap, watch this video from about.com on lye solution safety.

About.com Candle & Soap Making is an excellent resource for beginner soap makers.

Also check out their step-by-step photo tutorial on making cold process soap and the basic soap making video.

Another good resource is Teach Soap and the Teach Soap forum, created by the owner of Bramble Berry Soapmaking Supplies, Anne-Marie Faiola.  Anne-Marie’s blog, The Soap Queen, is loaded with lots of fun tutorials and other information for the soap maker.

Anne-Marie also has a YouTube channel, called Soap Queen TV.  Coming in April is a series of Soap Queen TV episodes on cold process soap making basics.

A wonderful book for beginning soapers is The Everything Soapmaking Book, by Alicia Grosso.  That is what I used when I started cold process soap making and it is great.

You can use many different things as a mold to make cold process soap.  I prefer a wooden mold, but when I first started out, I didn’t want to invest that much money, so I used a silicone bread pan.  They make great soap molds, but they are floppy, so if you use one, make sure you support it.  I use a shoebox.

A good starter recipe that does not require any fancy oils is a good place to start.  You can find all of the ingredients at the grocery store (except maybe the lye, but you can usually find that at the hardware store in the plumbing section – make sure it is 100% lye!).  Hold off on buying a bunch of fancy supplies until you decide that you like soap making.

Below is the first recipe I ever made, as recorded in my soap making notebook.  It uses olive, coconut and castor oils.  You can find castor oil in the pharmacy section of your supermarket, with the laxatives.  The castor oil gives the soap a very creamy feeling.  I personally don’t like it very much, so I don’t normally use castor oil anymore, but a lot of people like it.

Olive, Coconut, and Castor Oil Soap, 3-Pound Loaf

6.8 oz lye
16.2 oz water

31.5 oz olive oil
16 oz coconut oil
1.5 oz castor oil

All measurements are in weight ounces.

A few more tips:

• Always run your recipe through a lye calculator to make sure you use the correct amount of lye.  I have found mistakes in the recipes in soap making books!
• Make sure you have enough time to devote to making your soap, without any distractions.
• Have all of your materials ready ahead of time, before you mix anything.
• Be safe!
• Raw soap will hurt like the dickens if you get it on a paper cut!!
• Record everything you do in a notebook, for future reference and to see how far you’ve come.
• Have fun!

I really wanted to do tons of awesome Valentine’s Day posts and here I am, only a week before the big day, just now kicking it off.

And what better way to kick off a week of Valentine’s Day posts than with Melt and Pour Soap Cupcakes all dressed up for V day?

I left the “frosting” white and, even though the Jewelry Box colorants are not non-bleeding, it has been a week and there has been no bleed whatsoever.  If you are worried about bleeding, make the frosting pink.

I colored clear soap with the red colorant and soap-safe glitter, and added fragrance.  I poured a thin layer (~1/4 inch) into a silicone pan.  (I only wanted a couple of hearts, so I used a muffin pan, but if you want to make a bunch, use a brownie pan.)  I poured the rest of the soap into the silicone cupcake liners.  When the thin layer of soap was set, I popped it out and used a small metal heart cookie cutter to cut out the hearts.

When the cupcake was set, I made the frosting using white melt and pour soap, with added fragrance.  I stirred it with a fork until it was thick and poured/scooped it onto the cupcake, which was sprayed with alcohol to make it stick better.  Then, I sprayed the top with more alcohol and sprinkled on more glitter!

While the frosting was still freshly poured, I popped in the heart.

Give one to someone you love.  Just don’t let anyone eat it!

Unlike other silicone cupcake cups, Sili-cups gold their shape without needing a muffin tin and the edges are crisp little zig-zags.  They are, in a word, awesome.

I decided to play with my Soapylove Jewelry Box colorants and make some soap cupcakes.

I melted clear soap and mixed in fragrance, color, and the sparkle dust soap-safe glitter that comes with the color set, then poured the soap into the cups.

I played around with filling the cups to different levels.

While the soap hardened, I melted white soap and added the same color and fragrance.  These colorants are not non-bleeding, so I used the same color for the cupcake and frosting.

The “frosting” needs to be stirred and stirred until it cools and thickens enough to hold shape when it is poured on top of the cupcake base.  Then, you only have a few second before it gets too hard to pour, so be prepared to work quickly.

Spritz the cupcake with alcohol just before putting on the frosting.  Then, pour the soap frosting on, using a spoon to shape it.  If it floops of the edge of the cupcake when you pour it, just smoosh it back on; it gives it a more realistic frosting appearance.

Spritz again with alcohol and top with a sprinkle of the sparkle dust.

I loved them so much, I made lots of different colors!

I thought I would link to a couple of my Christmas posts from last year.  Here are a couple of simple melt and pour soap tutorials that are fun to make, give, and receive.

Christmas Tree Soap

Snowflake Soap