So, making soap has been another item on my list of crafty things I’d like to try someday. I had decided to give it a try and if it worked well, to make soap for folks for Christmas this year.

I used melt-and-pour base. This is the base melting.

After adding colorant, essential oils, and some other stuff to my first batch, this is the soaps cooling in the soap mold.

I had a hard time getting the soap out of the mold, and you can see from the squished floral design here that pushing really hard is NOT the solution.

Freezing the bars in the mold does the trick, though - the soap shrinks away from the sides just enough.

I considered this enough of a success that I will go ahead and make several other varieties of soaps for Christmas presents for the gals in the family.