Misc Christmas Soaps Pt 2

Here are the remaining photos of the soaps I’ve made for Christmas presents.

Turned out of the moulds. You can see the brown cameo to the right of the lavender soap.

I was wondering how to highlight the cameo a bit, and then remembered I’d ordered some cosmetic-grade mica powders for my soap making, and used some of the white. I put the cameo onto the top of the soap and drew round it with a scriber, and then with a modelling tool I gouged out some of the soap. I filled the cavity with the melted soap base, scored the base of the cameo, spritzed both surfaces with rubbing alcohol and popped the cameo in place. There was a bit of leakage of the melted soap base but I was able to get most of this off. Unfortunately I lost the pristine shiny surface of the soap straight from the mould but once wrapped, this didn’t matter quite so much. I did a bit more touching up with the mica powder once the cameo was in place.

Here it is, wrapped.

I made a label for the base. All the labels were written with my sepia Faber Castell Pitt Artist pen and embellished with distress inks. In the case of the lavender soap I used Milled Lavender and a touch of Dusty Concord on the lavender flower paintings, and the leaves were painted with Mowed Lawn.

Here are the rest of the soaps, all wrapped in cellophane and labelled. For the gardener’s soaps, I put the main label on the top, and added a small label giving the ingredients on the bottom, as this was a more complicated soap, and I thought the recipients might be interested to know what went into it, making it so suitable for garden and workshop use. The lemon soaps just had the label on the bottom, with the information about how this soap removes onion smells from one’s hands. The gardener’s soap labels were coloured with Spiced Marmalade distress ink, and the lemon soaps with Wild Honey distress ink.

The gardener’s soaps. The orange Stickles glitter glue doesn’t show up on the photos at all, but it is a nice echo of the speckled orange rind on the surface of the soaps, as is the label border.

Single gardener’s soap.

Label on base of gardener’s soap.

A pair of gardener’s soaps, tied with an orange ribbon.

Lemon soaps.

Lemon soap label.

The three teddy soaps, tied with ribbon, with applied decorative bow. Each soap is individually wrapped. They are definitely too small for everyday use, and I shall be sourcing a larger teddy soap mould online.

Three teddy soaps, side view. I had to put the middle one face down because they are not uniformly thick.

All that remains now is to finish packaging the honey soaps I made before. I want to make tags for these, using honeycomb-embossed card and my large bee stamp. I am a bit annoyed that the medium bee stamp is still out of stock, and I have been waiting for some time for an email notifying me that they have arrived – the large stamp is a bit too big for this but I can make something of it, no doubt.

After Christmas being a total non-event this year, everybody will have to put up with their presents being late! This week, I also have to make a bee birthday card to go with some of the honey soaps, and hope I shall retain enough energy to get that done, or it will be another late arrival.