A while back on my felt group (Fun_2_Felt on yahoo) someone said they tried to make soap and it didnt work out and ideas were given how to do it correctly. That got me searching to see if it really was that easy and came across Melt and Pour glycerine soaps - you buy the base and melt it, colour it and fragrance it and pour into a mould and its done (well you do have to wait for it to cool and set but you know what I mean).
These are my first ever soaps - I bought a kit off ebay to start out with and to see if I liked it (yeah ok so I did and Im hooked!) They are all glycerine clear base - green is lime fragrance oil (FO) the orange one is peach FO and the grassy looking one is lavender essential oil with lavender flowers in it (the grassy looking bits)
the next ones I made were rainbow soaps using some new base (clear and white glycerine base) and new pigment dyes that dont bleed into each other. I made it in a silicone cake tin and you do each layer one by one waiting for each to almost set before pouring the next. I ended up with lots of soaps - we use these at home as we seem to go through soap rather fast here and that is why I started making soaps - as a craft and to save having to buy soap! Not sure it saves any money but I do have fun doing it!
I got some more moulds - silicone ones are so great and easy to use - you can buy soap ones or just use cake ones which can give you some interesting desings like the gingerbread men.
Now I decided to get a bit more adventurous! This mould I bought from FreshSoap Ideas in Brisbane - she had done a soap in yellows and gold but I realised it could look like an African Violet if I did it in the right colours. So I bought some micas there too and poured the colours carefully to make this soap. What do you think? I love the micas as they give it a lovely glittery colour in the clear soap. I do the background in a plain colour over white base.
The next soaps are more experimenting - the pink ones are using a clear stamp in the bottom of the mould to give an impressed pattern and if you do it right and get the coloured layers correct it can turn out very well - better than mine Im afraid!
The blue one is an embeded soap using some left over bits placed into a clear layer
The gold soaps were ones my son suggested as he wanted to try the gold mica and see if you could make a "gold bar" not quite but very pretty.
This is another new mould - a silicone brownie tray - made lots of flowers in all different fragrances and colours - lots of fun!
bought some more muffin tins in silicone - this time hearts and the tiny ones are icecube trays! So did some embeded soaps - tiny ones inside the big hearts. I will use the other tiny ones later
I bought a set of cookie cutters in the shape of flowers and made the embeds for these soaps with a thin layer of soap cut out with 2 sizes of the cutters and a hole punch for the yellow centres. I then fitted them together and placed them inside the silicone flower mould
Similar thing with the rectangle ones above too but a simpler flower
Here are some more versions of the flower and leaf mould - you can do any colours you like really! Im thinking of having these on the craft table at the African Violet show in October.
Hope you like all my soaps and when I do some more I will do another post.
