Peppermint Soap

I'm continuing to work on Christmas gifts...really trying to stick to handmade and trying to get things done early to avoid last-minute stress. I had picked up a copy of a Martha Stewart Holiday special issue on handmade gifts, and found a cute idea for making striped peppermint loaf soap. Since I knew I was going over to my friend Allison's today for some crafting time, I figured it would be a good time to give this a try.

As it turns out, I should have looked up some more info online before I made the soap. The process went smoothly enough. I bought 4 lbs of melt-and-pour soap at Michaels - two pounds of clear olive oil glycerin soap, and two pounds of white shea butter soap. I also had peppermint essential oil and red food coloring. I melted, dyed, scented, poured, and repeated, until my soap loaves were complete. But when I got home and excitedly dumped my soap loaves out to cut them into pieces, and I began cutting, I discovered a slight problem. On about a third of my pieces, the layers of soap came apart. As I discovered, upon looking it up online, this is a common problem - conveniently NOT mentioned in the magazine article!! And there's an easy solution - in between each layer of soap, you just spritz a little rubbing alcohol before pouring the next layer - and this will cause them to adhere to each other. Unfortunately, there's no easy fix for AFTER the fact. So unless I figure out some magic, I guess we'll be using quite a bit of peppermint soap around here!!

The instructions can also be found online here...along with comments from people about the layer separation problem and solution!

***Update: I discovered that by using a long candle-lighter (actually, two of them - one in each hand), I was able to slightly melt the top layer of soap and then re-attach the separated layers fairly successfully. I only had a couple small drips, and overall, they turned out great! Yay!!