Cold Process Soapmaking Molds

Cold Process soap making is super fun and an addictive pastime that will quickly find you viewing everything you come across as a potential mold for your soap! Old tuna cans, cupcake tins, ice trays... You might think you've gone a little nutty when someone goes to toss out a takeout food container and you yell "no wait!!.... I could use that."

This page will share some great cold process soap making molds with you, whether you're looking for a traditional wooden loaf mold, or something a bit different. You'll also find some tips for cold process soap molds you can make yourself, or things you might already have in your home that you can use to create unique bars of cold process soap!

Happy soaping!

Photo from LilyBaySoap on Flickr

The answer is yes!

Durable, high quality wooden soap making molds can be a bit expensive, but often that expense offsets the work you'd have to do to build your own. However! If you're handy in the woodworking shop, you can build your own wooden cold process soap loaf mold with just a few materials and a bit of elbow grease.

This website has an awesome tutorial for building your own wooden soap making loaf mold out of a mitre box, with step by step instructions and pictures, too!

Make your own soap mold from a mitre box

Here's another wooden soap mold from scratch tutorial: Make your own wooden soap mold (makes 3 lb of soap)

And this forum has a great tutorial for lining your wooden cold process soap mold with silicone caulk for easy soap removal. It eliminates the time-consuming and often frustrating task of lining your molds with perfectly measured and folded waxed paper, and some people have found great success with it! So if you're a handy type, I'd definitely check this out.

If you're new to cold process soapmaking, you may want to have a look at some of these books to help you along! There is also a wealth of information available on the Web, but if you're like me, you love to supplement your Web information with a physical copy of a book in your hands.

I highly recommend "The Soapmaker's Companion". It is awesome and loaded with so many recipes, explanations and reference tables! (And I'm a bit of a dork and love things like that.)

As mentioned at the top of this page, once you start soaping, you start seeing potential in just about anything to be a soap mold. It's an obsession, but a yummy sudsy one!

Here are some common household items (or commonly found items that you don't have to go too far to find) that can make great molds for your cold process soap. When eyeing items with soap molding in mind, just remember that the material you use will have to be able to withstand temperatures of upwards of 150 degrees.

While you can't use anything with aluminum while mixing your soap, as long as you line your molds properly with freezer/wax paper you should be fine in using something with this material in it. Just make sure that the soap that you plan to use does not come in contact with the material before it's saponified properly.

Here are some ideas to get you started:

• Heavy duty ice cube trays
• Old cupcake tins you don't plan to use again
• Silicone bakeware that you don't plan to use for food
• Tupperware containers of all shapes and sizes
• Pringles cans (these make great cylinders of soap you can slice into rounds!)
• Shoe boxes
• Apparel gift boxes for flat 'trays' of soap you can cut into squares like brownies
• Tissue boxes with the tops cut off
• Paper towel or TP tubes
• Tennis ball tubes
• Rinsed and thoroughly cleaned soup, tuna, dogfood/catfood cans (with the top lip sawed off, otherwise your soap will get stuck behind the lip! beware of sharp edges)
• Basically, the sky is the limit with your imagination as long as you make sure your molds are well-lined, heat-resistant, and in a shape that you'll be able to either cut away or remove your soap easily from once you've poured it in!

Don't want to use your ice trays for soap, or that super cool silicone cake pan? Score some extras just for soapmaking! (Just make sure everyone else in the house knows that, or you may end up with some patchouli scented ice cubes and verbana mint brownies!)

Now that cupcakes are all the rage, muffin tins come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and are perfect for making individual soap bars without the hassle of having to cut them later. Just make sure if you're not using silicone that you line your tray!

Mini muffin size is particularly fun for guest soaps. You could put a whole bunch in a jar for a lovely decorative touch to your bathroom.

Say you use a loaf mold for your soap, or perhaps you make your own! You're going to have to figure out how to slice that into bars after its initial 24 hour or so incubation period. Some like to use kitchen knives, but they can be unwieldy and not cut straight if you don't have a special slot to cut down with.

These tools are actually really great for cutting soap, and the 'crinkle' cutters make a stunningly textured bar like this one from alliemaries on Flickr:

Have some great cold process soap making mold tips? Have molds you use that you swear by or have you made your own? How about tips or tricks to help your soap come out of the mold perfectly every time? I'd love to hear your thoughts here.