DIY wedding favors under $1 | This handmade lavender soap will wow your guest

You’ll be surprised at how easy and affordable this DIY wedding favors project is! This handmade lavender soap is so pretty and filled with nice lavender fragrance – perfect for using as wedding favors or baby shower favors!

Making wedding favors can be pricy because you usually have to supply a large amount. So instead of buying a large amount of products from a retail store, why not leverage the power of mass production? DIY handmade soap as wedding favors is very affordable when you mass produce them. And they are super practical too – as a minimalist, I value gifts that are practical 🙂

So how much does it cost per soap?

(I’ve included links for each material in the next section so you can get them online)

Soap mold $13.55 (this is something you can reuse forever. The more you make, the cheaper it gets)

Soap base (x2) $25.9

Soap colorant $4.24

Dried lavender flower buds $7.99

Total cost: $23.40

These material together will produce 72 soaps bars. So it is only $0.72 per soap! If I see these handmade soaps in a retail store, I wouldn’t believe it costs less than a dollar, as I’m pretty sure I saw some similar ones well above five dollars. What’s even better? If you make more than 72 soaps, it gets cheaper because you can reuse the soap molds and colorant! Woohoo!

DIY handmade soap wedding favors materials

Soap mold
Melt-and-pour soap base
Soap colorant
Dried lavender flower buds
Rubbing alcohol in a spray bottle (to remove little bubbles after pouring soap base into a mold)

DIY handmade soap wedding favors instructions

chop your melt-and-pour soap base into 1″ cubes to make it easier to melt. For the 5 lb soap base I got, I am able to fill the mold three times, which in total produce 36 soaps.
place 2/3 of 1″ cubes in a microwave safe container and heat it for 30s. After that check on base and stir it, if the base is not completely melted, stir it with a stirrer, and reheat it at 10s intervals and stir it until it is full melted.
Once the base is fully melted, add a few drops of blue and red colorant, stir it until it it well mixed into a light purple tone
Pour the mixture into the mold, evenly sprinkle dried lavender buds on the surface, then spray rubbing alcohol to remove bubbles formed on the soap surface
Let it dry. The drying time should be noted on your soap package as part of instruction (mine says 40 mins)
Once it is dried, it is time to add the second color. Melt the remaining 1/3 of 1″ cubes and no colorant is needed. Then pour it on top of the first layer.
Drizzle again with some lavender buds, and let it dry.
Once it is fully dried, slice them into the thickness of your liking. If you want to produce a similar sized soap as the photo, slide each finished soap block into 12 slices.

Now you are done! …with one batch. 😉 Depends on how many wedding favors you need, just repeat the process and make more! If you want to have more variety, try the combos I mentioned in the variation section.

A word on scent

I didn’t use any fragrance oil in this DIY project, as the lavender buds already have a nice lavender scent. Some soap base may also comes with a scent already. If you want to add some scent to your DIY handmade soap, simply add a few drops of essetnial oil or fragrance oil to the mix before pouring into mold.

Tips and tricks on making beautiful soaps

Since it it for wedding favor, not something you make for your husband to use everyday, making it nice is super important. Here’s my tips on making it looks professional without breaking the bank:

In my opinion, the”soap toppings”(lavender buds in this case) will add some nice texture and flare to a soap, essentially make it look beautiful. So I like to build them around the toppings I choose. For this lavender soap, I first picked lavender flower buds as my “toppings” since I have a bag of them laying around in my house. Then I used some red and blue soap dye to tint part of the soap into a lavender blue color to have the illusion that the soap bar is made of lavender. To add more interest, I left 1/3 of the soap white. For packaging, I used some purple tissue paper as wrapper to reinforce the “lavender” theme.

So in summary, here’s a beginner-friendly easy-to-follow formula you can use to build your own soap when you first started:

pick a topping + match the color of the topping, package it to match the theme

Handmade soap variations

What’s so fun about DIY handmade soap is that there’s endless variations! Once you get familiar with soup making, you will be able to come up with your own fairly easily depends on what you have one hand. Also, if you have some go-to soap recipe, please do share in the comment!

For me, I like to use food as toppings, such as green tea powder, oats, herbs, honey, etc. If they are safe to eat, they are definitely safe to be used on skin, plus it just feels natural and healthy. So here are three handmade soap variation ideasthat you can easily make from using materials you can find in the kitchen:

Oatmeal soap: Use rolled oats as toppings, either grind it and mix it in the soap, or sprinkle them on top. You can also add a little bit yellow and red colorant to add more color

Lemon poppy seed soap: Mix poppy seed and lemon zest either in the mix or as toppings. Use some yellow colorant to make it look brighter

Coffee exfoliating soap: Mix coffee ground into the soap base. It will turn the soap base into a brown color so no colorant is needed.

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