holiday recipes

You've seen them everywhere from crafts fairs to bath boutiques: pretty handmade gift soaps. Clear and colorful or rich with natural additives for beautiful skin, they're a welcome holiday gift.

Best of all, they're easy to make using melt-and-pour soap. Heated in the microwave, clear or opaque glycerin soap base is combined with colorants and fragrances, then poured into molds to harden. When cool, soaps pop right out of the molds, ready to use.

Follow these soap-making tips and soap starter projects to help you master this squeaky-clean craft:

Basic Instructions for Melt-and-Pour Soap

Tips for Successful Soap-Making

Starry Night Soap: Melt-and-Pour Soap Project

Alphabet Soap: Melt-and-Pour Soap Project

Confetti Creations Soap: Melt-and-Pour Soap Project

Transparent soap the color of the sky. A crescent moon and shining star glow through a sweep of glitter stars.

This project teaches how to add cut-out opaque soap inclusions to clear bars. A bonus: free printable gift tags make this a great holiday gift!

Makes 1 4-ounce bar.

Splish-splash! A special child's name embedded in a bar of clear soap makes bath time fun for little ones. Pre-cut foam shapes make it easy.

More ideas? Add holiday messages to soaps for the guest room. For a "lady of the manor" touch, create personalized soaps with monograms or the family name for guest baths.

Makes 2 4-ounce bars.

A two-in-one gift for a special little girl: colorful plastic hair ornaments encased in a bar of glittering soap.

Made with clear glycerin soap base, soap fragrance and a pinch of soap glitter, this simple soap is an excellent beginning project.

Makes 1 4-ounce bar.

Keep these tips in mind for soap success. They'll help take you from newbie to master crafter in short order.

kit and caboodle
Brand-new to soap craft? Try a kit! Soap-making kits contain everything you'll need to create your first projects. They're usually a bit less expensive than purchasing components separately, and they can teach you the ins and outs of a new craft quickly.

A good kit will spark your imagination for more ambitious endeavors, start you off with an assortment of tools and supplies, and give motivation a boost.

patience is a virtue

All told, melt-and-pour soap-making requires only simple skills: cut, heat, cool and pour. Try to rush the job, however, and you'll mar the final product.

Patience is a virtue with soap-making. Each bar is built as a series of steps, with time between to allow for cooling of the soap base, hardening of poured soaps to support soap inclusions, and cooling completely before removing from the molds. Rush any of these processes, and you'll see the adverse reaction in the soap.

Just the basics, Ma'am.  Use this general guide to begin soap crafting with melt-and pour soap.  For more advanced project ideas, see the links at the bottom of the page.