Melt & Pour Soap Making: BFF Weekend Soap Gifts

My daugther has linked up with her BFF college friends for the last 12 years. There are 10 BFF girls. They meet every year at some way cool lodge, house or resort for an extended weekend. My job is to come up with gifts for my daughter to present to each of her BFF gals.

After spending a weekend in Chicago and seeing all the Fall & Autumn displays, I found the perfect gift. An Autumn soap using our new Water Dissolving Paper.

I presented the idea to my daughter (we have some cool Winter ideas in the works as well) and she loved it. These soap leaves were printed on our GPE Water Dissolving Soap Paper. The template is sold on our web site. We used a color laser printer. You will want to be sure that the laser printer is cool before printing. If you want to print mulitple sheets, wait at least 10 minutes before inserting and printing the next sheet. You can also use an ink-jet printer, but you risk issues of colors bleeding. To help prevent this color bleed, you may need to spray with a fixative. Hairspray works well, but you will need to let the printed/sprayed paper sit for a few days. The laser printer does not require this step.

Cut around the edges of the printed leafs.

Melt clear soap base in the microwave. You will only need to melt enough soap base to dip each leaf. DO NOT OVERHEAT. Dip the leaves in clear melt & pour soap base keeping the temp to around 125 to 130 degrees. You can scent the soap base if you wish. For my daughter's event, I used Apple Autumn fragrance since my daughter will be purchasing an apple or apple cinnamon candle to compliment the soap leaves.

It took 3 of us to test these soap leaves. We took turns washing our hands until the soap dissolved. Our guess... you can use each leaf for about 3 hand washings before it totally dissappears. My staff had fun with this design and I must say, at the end of the day we all had very clean hands.

My daughter will be packaging these soap leaves in one of our glassine envelopes and creating a hand-made greeting card (with some kind of clever message) to present to her alumni friends. Once I've helped her create the packaging, I will post on my blog for inspiration.