Soap packaging

One of the pleasures of soapmaking is not only looking at the finished soaps, but also gift-wrapping them. Whenever I'm out of ideas, I like to look at the Flickr soap packaging foto pool or simply browse photos tagged with "soap packaging".

Some professional soapmakers like MacSoapy and El Sapone offer some of their label designs for noncommercial use on their blogs (I also love to look at El Sapones product labels, mostly in art nouveau style). I have downloaded loads of them and cannot make enough soap for all the labels I'd like to try... There was another website which offered labels for noncommercial use (vivaidee or something), but I can't find it anymore :(.

Here's a label I made with one of El Sapone's designs:

I'd love to make my own designs, but I'm no photoshop wizard plus I don't even have photoshop. Tried to make labels with Gimp, which is a free graphics software. I found a "pizza slice" add-on which allows you to automatically mirror pictures to make tiles. The results were okayish, but I haven't found a more powerful mirroring add-on which allows me to determine which angle should be mirrored etc. (If somebody knows one, please tell me!) Here is one of my tiles and its pattern:

Peppermintsoaps again

I've had very little time to make soaps these past months. If I don't start making new soaps soon, this blog will feature more soap made by others than my own creations, and I'll be paying royalties soon. I had better invest the money into soap ingredients.

These are some of the gems Peppermintpatty gave me the last time I went over to her place for tea and a soapchat. Link to her fotostream

This one was made with leftover bits from other soaps and a black soap base which smells wonderful (have to ask Peppermintpatty which perfume oil she used). Love the petal bits on top. Haven't had the heart to use this one yet.


Nüsslein had this light, lovely, warm smell of nuts. Didn't make lots of lather, but was very good to my skin. I'm always creeped out when cosmetics are called "nourishing", but I felt this soap really was nourishing my skin.

This one is calld All Sorts. It was made with lard and is scented with a clean, fresh perfume oil. Haven't tried it yet, but I am told that lard makes good lather...


As you can see from the little bags above, Peppermintpatty gave me more soaps than these three. I'll show the others in one of my next posts.