Custom Soap

One of my friends wanted some custom soap for her mother's 70th birthday party and asked if I would help.

Wow! I learned alot this time around! This is the first time I've made custom soap.

She wanted the soap to look like this:

Found Here

She wanted the color to be pinkish/rose like these candles:

She also wanted goat's milk soap, but it was impossible to get the color she wanted with goat's milk. The color was always brown.

This is the mold I wanted:

Found here at Soap Making Resource

but since I was only going to charge her for materials to make the soap I don't want to invest $32 in a mold.

Instead I made one out of card board, which worked out okay. Then Hubby found pencil boxes at Hobby Lobby that were better than the cardboard molds. They were only $4 each, so we have two. If you want to see what they look like, you can find them here. The brand is Really Useful Boxes and they are smooth on the inside and very strong. I lined mine with parchment paper so that the soap would slide out easily.

But the Really Useful Boxes don't have the really nifty miter cut so that I can cut the soap straight.

Instead I used the old cardboard soap mold end as a guide.

I made a mark about 1" past the end of the box and lined up the end of the soap with the mark. Then I kept the cutter lined up with the edge of the box so that the soap was even from top to bottom.

The mark 1" from the side of the mold is on the flap that lays on the counter. The 3" x 5" card at the bottom made it easy to slide the soap along the mold.

Soap that is almost exactly the same height!

Although the soap doesn't look uniform in color in this photo, after a few days the color has evened out and I think she will be very happy with the final product.

It took me about 12 pounds of 'practice soap' before I was able to get the right color. Sheesh! That's why I only do this for friends and I don't do it for a job.

I had to throw away 4 lbs of soap that I had used titanium dioxide in. For some reason the titanium dioxide didn't allow the lye to combine with the fats, so the soap would have been dangerous to use.

The dye I used was a powdered dye, which I have never used before. I mixed it with water and then used a syringe to get the same amount into each of the 4 batches of soap so the color would be as close as possible between all the batches.

The rest of the soap will be either used at home or given away. Most of it is unscented, which means that any of my kids will use it because they don't care what the color is (and there are ranges of color for tan to brown to bright orange!)