Stamping of the Soap

Ever wonder how I get those cute little butterflies on our soaps? That's easy, by way of a soap stamp! I'll explain how I do this and why I chose a butterfly stamp of all things. Pictured above is a new batch of Peppermint soap that has been recently sliced two days ago. Soap is soft when you cut so I like to let it sit for a day or two to give it time to firm up a bit. By giving the soap time to get a little more firm you will get a cleaner and more defined characteristics of the imprint.

Why I use a butterfly stamp

Nearly everything I make has a personal meaning behind it and has a distinct purpose. If you look closely you will see butterflies on many of our products. From our logo to the designs in our soap, the image of a butterfly inspires me. Why? Because butterflies start out ordinary and develop into something beautiful, completely changed from its origin. For example think about soap, the ingredients in my favorite recipe are olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil, lye, water or milk, shea butter, caster oil, oatmeal and the fragrance. Well when I melt the oils down and combine all of these things together it doesn't look like much. I pour the soap batter in its mold where it stays all nice and warm for awhile, just like a cocoon. Then when I take it out of its mold the soap batter has transformed into something that is completely different than where it started. It still looks a bit odd because you can only see the outside and it's usually in a form of a big loaf. But then, I begin to slice the soap and each and every slice is different from the one before. Sorry to sound sappy here but it's like it takes on a life of its own and just develops into something beautiful. It never fails, the colors and designs blend together just as they should and I'm usually amazed at the results. The inside is beautiful! But enough of the sappy talk lets get back to stamping.

This is my butterfly stamp!

Soap stamps are usually made from glass or acrylic, a hard composite that can effectively stamp the soap. As with everything there is a happy medium for when the stamping needs to occur. If you wait too long and the soap becomes completely hard, a mallet will need to be used to apply enough pressure to stamp for it to embed into the soap, this could lead to cracking the soap if your not careful. If stamping occurs when the soap is too soft, part of the soap could lift away with the stamp. A good rule of thumb that I go by is to wait 1-2 days altering cutting the soap.

Now it's time to place the soap on a even, hard surface so that there is no wiggling when you apply pressure to the stamp. I place the stamp where I think it would look best on the soap. I tend to stamp in the lower right hand corner for consistency. Enough pressure will need to be applied to produce the image without going to too deep that the stamp base touches the soap. If too much pressure is applied the stamp base (square part) will also imprint into the soap.

From the picture above you can see all the details of the stamp clearly in the soap. I really like it when the colors in the soap are also part of the stamping, see the little butterfly and how the red is part of the wing? This just adds to the definition of the design. Each slice of soap is stamped by hand with love 😊

Here are the finished slices of the peppermint soap, this batch yielded 14 bars which is just about average for the molds I use. The embellishment on top was created by chopping up a red bar of soap that I had made previously and placed them on top of the soap batter immediately after pouring into the mold.

Feel free to comment or ask questions. Thank you for taking the time to read our blog. Like us on Facebook to see more of our soaps and other products.
Mary