Kimberly is a graphic designer, and one of the newest employees here at Evermine. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her daughter, and enjoys coffee, exploring the Northwest and pretty stationery. You can read all about Kimberly and see more of her work on her website here.
Generally speaking, most of the gifts I give are store bought rather than homemade. In my experience, homemade gifts can be messy, time consuming and I don’t always get the result I hope for. However, making your own soap is super easy, and you can get as creative as you want with scents, colors, molds and soap bases. Also, since it’s soap, the cleanup is not that bad!
There is a huge variety of different soap molds available on Amazon.com, and my local Michaels store has an entire soapmaking section with many choices of ingredients. One of the fun parts of making homemade soap is that, once cooled, you can package them up any way you want. They fit in the Evermine small cotton muslin bags perfectly (originally I used burlap bags, but I don’t recommend them with these soaps because the fibers from the bag will stick to your bars of soap). They make lovely gifts or favors when packaged with custom Evermine tags.
- 3 two-pound blocks of soap base (we used 2 of these and also a block of goats milk soap)
- Silicone soap molds
- Lavender essential oil
- Soap colorant (we actually had a pack of primary colored soap dyes, and mixed the blue and red in varying amounts for a variety of purples, pinks & periwinkle colors)
- Microwavable glass bowl
- Microwave
- Metal stirring spoon
- Dinner knife for cutting soap
- Small evermine cotton muslin bags
- Large evermine Tuxedo Formal hang tags
- Baker’s twine
- Our soapmaking process was simple, and consisted of: cutting the soap blocks in smalll chunks (we found a regular dinner knife worked best for this), and making batches half a block at a time (1 pound).
- We put the 1 pound batches of soap pieces in the microwave for 30 seconds at a time, stirred, and repeated until the soap base was completely melted. The next step was to add our scent of choice (lavender). We put in as many drops into the bowl of soap base as we felt it needed to have a nice lavender scent (we used the entire bottle for 6 lbs of soap), and then we stirred in drops of red and blue soap dyes (Caitlyn had purchased a pack of primary colored soap dyes, since the pinterest recipe she found called for yellow). I hadn’t planned on adding dye originally but we thought it would be fun to use blue and red to make shades of lavenders.
- Since we only had the one soap mold that Caitlyn purchased on Amazon, we got a little creative and used a regular metal muffin tin from her kitchen. We poured the liquid soap into both trays. To help speed up the cooling process, which was supposed to be 30 minutes in room temperature, we utilized the fridge and freezer, which worked great and reduced the cooling time by at least 20 minutes. After the soap cooled in the trays, we took them out and set them on a paper towel on the counter, and then later divided them up in sets of two. We packaged them in the cotton muslin bags and tied customized Evermine tags to them.
Used In This Project:
- Large Oval Hang Tags • The “Tuxedo Formal” style in chalkboard tuxedo.
- Small Cotton Muslin Bags • The small size.
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Kimberly is a designer at Evermine. She lives in Portland, Oregon with her 3 year old daughter, and enjoys coffee, exploring the northwest and pretty stationery.
I love homemade soaps, love the idea, the smell and the way it feels on my body.
What I don’t like is what it does to my shower door and tiles. I hate cleaning it off everything.
So I just buy beautiful soaps and put them where I can smell them see them and love them. From a distance.
What a fantastic idea! Thanks for sharing the recipe. What guest would not be impressed with these specialty and artistic soaps?