Thursday, December 10, 2009

Ideas for Wrapping Soap

How you wrap the soap you have made with your own hands will depend on whether you will: sell the soap, give them out as presents, or keep them for family or personal use. Your packaging may have to be more professional-looking if your home production is a growing business. Whatever the case, wrapping soap can be a test of your resourcefulness but also a source of enjoyment. It’s a craft in itself with plenty of room for creativity.

When it comes to handmade bars of soap, you can afford to be homey and less commercial-grade with your wrapping. After all, there’s an unrefined naturalness associated with this kind of stuff.

Wrapping Soap Ideas: Carton Boxes

Making uniformly sized carton boxes in which to package your soap will require cardboard cutting and folding apparatus, unless you decide instead to buy your boards pre-folded. There’s no way you can make boxes in large numbers manually. If you don’t have the resources for obtaining machinery or feel that you should invest your money elsewhere, then you might as well wrap your soap in packaging paper. If you are giving them away as personal gifts, then gift wrapping paper is, naturally, what you’ll need.

Wrapping Soap Ideas: Plain Wrapping

If you are out simply to package your soap without any intention of making them look like gift items, your ideas for wrapping soap might include the following:

For fold-and-paste paper wrapping:
Packaging paper – food paper will do as well
Brown paper bags – choose a size that fits your soap snugly, or make your soap in sizes that fit available paper bags
Ziplock plastic sachets
For hard packaging:
Carton boxes
Brown Craft boxes
Acetate tubes or boxes, which may be clear, or tinted blue or red, etc.
Recycled, lidded tin containers

Making Your Soap Gift-able

However you can easily modify any of these plain ideas for wrapping soap or packaging them to come up with gift-able items. You can, for example, do some tying up with an ornamental string, add a ribbon, attach a colorfully designed sticker paper, or wrap up the package in cellophane paper. Placing a couple of your wrapped soap inside a gift paper bag will also do the trick.

You won’t easily run out of ideas for wrapping soap or packaging them as gift items. They are as many as your resources and imaginativeness will allow. We have just mentioned a few of them. Here are some more:

Handy crate packs. Pine wood would make good material for these small crates. Make soap bars of sizes that stack snugly inside.

Fabric gift bags. Mesh, organza, muslin, and calico are some of the textiles used in making these cloth packs.

Cellophane paper bundle-ups. Tie up the bundle with a yarn, slender hemp rope, or raffia ribbon. During the Christmas season, you can use shiny green, red or gold Twistee wires.

Recycled, lidded tin containers. Reusing old items should be part of your ideas for wrapping soap. Make sure the mouth of your tin can is wide enough to take out soap without the hand getting jammed.

Glass jars. Place bars of various colors or designs inside the jar or other glass bottles. Add a ribbon or colorful sticker.

Cardboard boxes with cellophane window. The viewing hole can be round, square, or the shape of a star, Christmas tree or angel.

Gift baskets. Bundle up several soap bars, a loofah and colored face towel with cellophane paper or see-through fabric. You can use a tray or plastic bowl in place of woven basket.

Gift paper bags. You can buy these bags or make your own. If you don’t know how to fold your paper or card board into a bag, unravel one you’ve bought and imitate the folding pattern.

Corrugated cardboard wraps. You can also simply roll your soap inside corrugated cardboard, leaving the sides of the bar exposed. Tie up with an ornamental string or ribbon.

A Few More Ideas for Wrapping Soap

Soap that is viewable through wrapping makes your handiwork more interesting. You may want to allow a peek to some feature of the soap, such as a cool color or an embossed name, logo or emblem. For added attraction, stick printed descriptions of your soap somewhere in your packaging. The following are examples of fancy soap names others have given their own soaps.

Sweet almond baja; Mediterranean chamomile; English white lavender; Mint swirl avocado oil soap; Tea tree wake-up bar; Patchouli blend soap; Kitchen citrus scrub.


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