Melt-and-pour soap is popular and widely used to make handmade soap as its ability to be layered, embedded, colored, and molded into incredible designs. After showing a few recipes of melt and pour handmade soap, here are few more examples which is considered slightly difficult and more works but very special soap . All projects here is using melt and pour method.
a) Stained-Glass Embedded Soap
Light flowing through colored, transparent soap can create beautiful and unexpected effects.
- From whole bars (or scraps) of transparent, colored clear soap, cut into a variety of shapes in smaller size.
- Weigh the shapes with digital scale. Arrange them in a slab mold or in individual cavity molds. (These six soaps use 10 ounces [283.5 g] of embed shapes.)
- You need to calculate the amount of overpour required by subtracting the weight of the embeds (here, 10 ounces or 283.5 g) from the total weight of the final soaps being made (in this case, 24 ounces or 680 g). Melt the overpour amount needed (in this case, 14 ounces or 396.5 g) clear soap base. Add in ¼ teaspoon silver or gray mica.
- Set the gray soap cools to about 130°F (54.5°C), spray the embeds gently with rubbing alcohol. Then pour the gray soap over the embeds carefully, try not to disturb the pieces as much as possible.
- As some gray overpour will inevitably seep under the embeds and be poured over the embeds, you’ll need to plane the soap on a soap planer or mandoline slicer to get a clean face on the soap to reveal the embeds.
- Set it sit for about 2-3 hours to harden and you can start release the soaps from mold
b) Cookie Cutter Embed Soap
This recipe uses a bar of swirled soap to create embedded pieces of soap, and plain white soap is used as an overpour around the embeds. The techniques of this is very much similar to the first recipe.
- Get several bars of pre-made soap, cut out embeds using small cookie cutters with different sizes and shapes. Note the total weight of all the embeds.
- Arrange the embeds in single-cavity molds.
- In order to know the amount of soap base for the overpour, take the total weight of the finished soaps and subtract the weight of the embeds.
- Melt the soap base and add in few drops of fragrance oil. If the embeds are already scented from their original batches, just calculate enough fragrance for the overpour (about 3 percent by weight). Otherwise, use more fragrance is required (4 to 5 percent by weight).
- For this project, we are making six (4-ounce or 113 g) soaps with 10 ounces (283.5 g) of embeds. So, 24 ounces (680 g) of finished soaps minus 10 ounces (283.5 g) of embeds = 14 ounces (396.5 g) of overpour. The embeds are already scented, so about 0.4 ounce (11 g) fragrance oil is added to the overpour.
- Let the melted overpour soap cool to 125°F to 130°F (51.5°C to 54.5°C).
- Lightly spray the embeds with rubbing alcohol and gently pour the overpour over the embeds.
- Let the soap sit for 2 hours to cool and harden. Then you could release the soaps from mold.
c) Jelly Roll Melt-And-Pour Soap
- Melt 6 ounces (170 g) of clear soap base in the microwave for about 30 seconds or double boiler on the stove. Add in 3 tbsp (45 ml) liquid *glycerin and 0.20 ounce (5.6 g) fragrance oil. (*The glycerin will make the soap pliable even after it cools.)
- Add in 0.25 tsp pink mica. Pour the soap into a 9-inch (23 cm) slab mold.
- While waiting the pink layer to cool, melt together 2 ounces (56.5 g) white soap and 1 tbsp (15 ml) liquid soap.
- Whip the melted soap until it is light and creamy.
- Lightly spray the pink layer with rubbing alcohol. Pour the whipped soap over the first layer. Smooth it so it is even. Let the two layers cool.
- Gently release the soap and lay it on table or a flat surface.
- Slowly bend about 0.5 inch (1 cm) of the soap over to begin the roll.
- Continue slowly rolling the soap tightly.
- Drizzle a bit of melted clear soap onto the last edge to glue the roll shut.
- Set it aside to cool and harden. Then slice the soap roll into small individual soaps.
