As you head to the back of your local craft store, searching for soap supplies, you may have walked down one of the aisles bursting with design elements intended for scrapbooking and other paper crafts. Or, you may be a dedicated “cropper” with much scrapbooking experience and a stash of beautiful treasures.

All those stickers, rubber stamps, embellishments, and beautiful papers can be pressed into service as exquisite presentation materials for your soapy creations. A small packet of colored paper bags and a sheet of seasonal stickers is a wonderful and easy alternative to presenting your hostess with a bar of soap in the plastic sandwich bag you grabbed on your way out the door to dinner with friends.

Rubber stamps on blocks and the kind of stamps with a band of changeable letters can work well for embossing soap and stamping the label you use to package it. Be sure to clean your stamps of soap residue that may decay the rubber and metals over time. Borrowing from another craft, stepping stone making, you can find sets of individual letters that will make clear imprints on your soap.

Select a set of stickers or other embellishment that suits the nature of your gift. You can go by event theme (such as birthday, graduation, or anniversary), by season, or by the nature of the soap itself (such as a nature-oriented decoration for an all-natural bar or a tropical theme for coconut-scented soaps). Select papers and ribbon to coordinate, add a fancy-edge scissors or a shaped paper punch, and all you have to do is put it together.

You'll find a few examples below. Using this approach if you're selling your soap is not going to be economical, but for ease in assembling a single gift or a small number of items, these materials are perfect. Encourage the happy recipient of your gift to actually use the soap, no matter how pretty it is.

Examples:

1. Seashore

   • Sheer white vellum
   • Seashell vellum stickers

   Wrap chunky bars all the way, like a package. Embellish with shell stickers, letting the stickers fold around the corners.

2. Thanksgiving

   • Dimensional Thanksgiving theme stickers
   • Pearlized gold paper

   Cut paper into wide cigar-bands that reach all the way to the edge of the soap. Carefully place a sticker in the center of the large surface.

3. Butterflies

   • Pearlized pink paper
   • Dimensional butterfly stickers

   Cut wide cigar bands and wrap the bars. Affix stickers to bend around the corners.

4. Baby Shower

   • Pearlized pink and blue paper
   • Hanging metal baby-shower-themed charm

   Make cigar-band wrappers from the paper. Thread the charms onto coordinating pastel raffia. Tie to suspend the charm in the center of the front surface.