No Dirty Coffee Luvah Here

As an adult, one of the first of two serious crafting genres that I engaged in was making soap bars out of melt & pour soaps. It's simple. It's clean. And your kitchen will smell great while making them. I would definitely suggest trying this craft, especially if you have never partaken in any other crafting. Besides the melt & pour soap available at most sewing/craft stores, you only need a few other supplies which you probably already have available. I purchased a mold years ago, but it isn't necessary to do so. I still use an old Tupperware cold cut keeper and a plastic cheese keeper that my friend, Kelly (hello dotta!), gave me a while ago.

The only advantage of having a mold is that you don't have to cut the slab into bars, or you want shapes other than the standard rectangular or square bars. I actually enjoy cutting the soap into bars and it gives me a reason to use that silver plated wedding cake knife that I had tucked away years ago and saved for??? 🤔

There are several ways to melt the soap, but I prefer cutting the slab into cubes and then dropping them into my makeshift double boiler. I then stir it occasionally with a recycled chop stick.

Once all is melted, I pour the mixture into a measuring cup and then stir in my additives. Additives can be anything from colors, scented oils, spices, seeds, citrus rinds, etc. For this soap that I made, I used an essential oil and mixed it with instant coffee.

Instant coffee? Yes! My mother kept it at home and when I say 'it', I mean many jars. When she passed, she must have had at least 12 brand new jars. Anytime anything went on sale, she would buy it in bulk proportions as if the item would never, ever be on sale again. 🥰 So what happened to all of the jars? I took them home and have used them to dye muslin, add to cake batter and icing, and used some in this batch of soaps. The only thing I won't do is drink them. 😖

For this batch of soaps, I decided to use my mold since it's been a while. I just poured the hot liquid in using the measuring cup which makes it so much easier to do rather than trying to pour it out of the pot. Believe me on this one! Even though cleanup is easy with this project, you still don't want it all over your stove top or counter.

I really liked the deep rich color that the coffee produced, and the smell was fantastic. The only thing to do at this point was to wait for the bars to harden - like waiting for paint to dry. 🥱You can leave them on your counter for about 2-3 hours, or you can put them in your refrigerator for about 1 hour. If you decide to put them in your refrigerator, make sure you put the mold on a plate, or small baking sheet, so you can move the mold without it collapsing on you. Once they are hardened, you just turn the mold over and pop them out. Voila!

I came across a tip recently that stated that if you want really shiny soap, you put the bars into cold water and swish them around. Then while using latex gloves so you don't leave fingerprints, you remove the bars from the cold-water bath and place on a cooling rack. Look at the shine on these soap bars. Nische!

Finally, my favorite part - wrapping! Some people add their wrapping or label over their bars as is, or naked. Personally, I always wrap mine with a clingy plastic wrap first because I want to keep them perfectly clean. It not only helps to preserve the scent, but it also keeps any oil from saturating the final wrapping. Below, I played around with some used brown paper bags that I used to make popcorn in and added some notions that I had available. Here are the final results as follows:

I just wanted to mention that I don't know why the packaging on the soap bar with the feather on it came out looking like it had soap drippings on it. This was not the case, and I am guessing it may have had something to do with using the cut-out option on Wix. Otherwise, I have nothing...

And on this note, I think I will go have a cup of coffee or maybe just take a bath, or both!