Simple Steps on How to Make Your OWN Soap Tutorial

Learning how to make your own soap is crazy simple and a REALLY fun (although potentially messy!) project to make with your kids! This post is not intended to show you a fancy gourmet lush soap tutorial, but rather one that’s fun and safe for the kids to make with adult help.

How to Make Your Own Soap:

Below is an old tutorial (sorry for the less than lovely photos!) with simple instructions on how to make your own soap, and even add toys into them!

These photos were taking WHILE making the soap with preschoolers so there is no staging beautified photos – these are actual soaps that the preschoolers made!

Materials Needed:

• food coloring
• glycerin soap base
• glass containers
• small toys (optional)

Since this was my first test batch, I had to dig through my drawers to look for something fun to put inside the soap! I wanted to make sure that nothing melted in the process!

As you can see I found a pair of clown birthday cake decor! Anything will work! After I did this trial run I used other little dollar store toys and made additional batches. Here are some ideas of small toys you can put inside of your soap:

• LEGO minifigures
• dinosaurs
• small dolls
• figurines
• plastic cars

Step 1.-

Place chunks of your glycerin soap base into a glass container (I used a Pyrex dish from my kitchen) and melt it slowly on the stovetop. There is no need to stir. You can if you want to, but don’t stir it too much or you will add additional air bubbles into your soap which will make the toy harder to see, and the soap look kind of weird.

I really didn’t measure my glycerin amount since this experiment was just for my kids and they didn’t care what it really looked like as long as there was a toy inside and it made bath time more fun.

If you’re going to make this as a gift you may want to look for more precise measurements. If you’re just making it with your kids, just kind of eyeball the amount based on the size of your container you’re using. I used two large spoonfuls.

Step 2.-

After the glycerin base is completely melted in your glass dish, add your food coloring (which is of course optional as well!). A drop or two is more than sufficient and goes a long way.

As you can see below, my son wanted all of the colors in his! They looked pretty, until we mixed them all together. But it was his very own soap creation so at least he loved it!

As you’ll see below, a few of the pictures make his soap look pretty interesting. But my son said his was a pirate in a swamp so I went with it.

Step. 3-

Unless you’ve already purchased a silicone soap mold, I highly recommend lining your glass container with a piece of foil to make your soap removal easier, otherwise you’ll need to use a knife to cut and pry your soap out which will ruin it.

Pour your colored melted glycerin base into the dish or mold you want to mold the soap in. You can place your toy into the dish before or after you pour. It doesn’t really matter too much. As mentioned, this process overall works best with soap molds, but we needed something cheap and immediate and a glass dish did the job.

Lately I’ve even being seeing some silicone molds at the dollar tree for crafting, so you can try there or your local craft store or here on Amazon. They really aren’t very expensive to buy just one.

One thing to be mindful of is how big your toy is versus the size of your soap mold! This was not something I had really thought of ahead of time!

Step 4.-

For the quickest way to harden your soap, you can place it in the fridge until it gets firm which took my small Pyrex dishes of soap about 20 minutes. You can see below my son’s green swamp pirate soap!

Really the biggest concern on making soap with kids when just using a glycerin base it really any hot liquids while pouring or placing toys.

Step. 5-

Your last step is simple! Just remove your soap and enjoy your bath!

One other thing I will note in regards to using a glass dish vs. a silicone mold is that as you can see above, the soap WILL mold to the folds in your aluminum foil. It of course didn’t bother my kids, but if you’re making it as a gift you might want a smoother look that a silicone mold provides.

It was a lot of fun for our first quick attempt and the kids were very happy with their homemade soap!

If you don’t want to have to shop around for all of your items, check out this kid’s dinosaur soap DIY kit or this unicorn DIY soap kit for kids!

Share with your friends!