"GETTING YOUR HANDS DIRTY" MAKING MELT AND POUR SOAPS

With most melt and pour soaps, as the term implies, you melt the soap base and pour it into a mold of some description.  You'll find, as you purchase and the downloads in the store, many of my soap designs require a more "hands on" approach. 

Though I'm not what you'd call a "good cook", I manage.  When I make meatloaf, I put the ground meat and all the goodies into one large bowl and mix it and squish it together with my hands.  I'm not particularly keen on getting raw meat underneath my fingernails, but I think it makes a better, moister meatloaf.

When my grandmothers made biscuits, there was no large appliance in which to place the flour and milk and lard and have the dough blended up for you, they dug in a mixed it with their hands, kneading the dough to exactly the right consistency for amazingly yummy biscuits.

Though the "taste" element has been removed, I am a firm believer that you still need to "get your hands dirty" when you make melt and pour soaps.  Until you handle the just set or almost set or only stir-cooled soap, you can't really, well . . . get a feel for the various stages of setting the soap goes through.  This "hands on" approach will give you a greater insight to how to manipulate the soap and what to expect from the soap, the same way my grandmothers new, by touch, exactly when the dough was ready to patty out into biscuits.