Homemade Soap and Handmade Valentines

My kids like to give store bought candy valentines to their friends, so we buy those. But sometimes it's fun to make a little something special for the teachers and aides.  My very first batch of homemade soap happened to be ready just in time for Valentine's Day. Today I'm going to share my recipe for homemade soap, and share some pictures of how I packaged it up for some handmade valentines. 

 Inside each one of the bags is a bar of soap.

These were really easy to package up.  I made a paper wrap from a single strip of patterned paper and a printable label.  Then I slipped them in these pretty little treat bags.  While the perfect color for Valentine's Day, these pretty printed bags are from Pebbles Inc's  Special Delivery baby girl collection (coming to stores very soon!). 

I sealed the bags shut with a piece of washi tape (that stuff is just so darn useful!).  I punched 2 little holes through the top of the bag.  I then wrote a quick note ("You're a soaper teacher!") on a Pebbles Yours Truly tag and threaded it through the holes in the bag. I finished it off with a little sticker matching sticker in the corner of the bag. 

For those of you who like making soap. I thought I'd share my recipe.  If you haven't made cold process soap before there are a lot of really good step by step tutorials if you search on-line.  I'm not going to re-invent that wheel.  However, I did come up with this recipe on my own. I wanted something that used shea butter, and I built from there.  If you're just getting into making soap, I'd really encourage you to find out about different oil and butters and how they effect your soap.  It's really interesting to find which ones clean well, which ones lather up well, which ones are super moisturizing...etc. Anyways, here's the recipe I came up with.  After 4 weeks the pH is testing at about a 9, so it's in just about the perfect range.

Coconut Shea Butter Soap 

(5% superfatted)

 10 oz olive oil
10 oz coconut oil
5 oz shea butter
6 oz soybean oil

 4.3 oz lye
5 oz water

5.25 oz coconut milk

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