Stocking Stuffers: Good Clean Fun

The handmade soaps are nice for grown ups, but kids don't get much out of a bar of soap...unless it's shaped like an animal or has a toy inside. I didn't mention yesterday, but you actually can put a small plastic dinosaur or something like that in the middle of a bar of glycerine soap. I haven't done it yet, but might this year, because I think my boys would like that. Another thing added to the "to try" list. But today I want to tell you about some more little gifts I have tried. It's pretty easy to make molded soap. It's actually kind of a fun activity to do with kids if you are looking for a project to do together. 

For these soaps I grated a couple bars of Ivory soap with my cheese grater. Then add warm water just a teaspoon at a time until you can get it to all stick together into a thick dough-like substance. If you want to add colors, divide it up into as many colors as you want and add gel food coloring stirring it with a spoon or squishing with your hands until evenly colored. Then you can press the soap into a candy or soap mold. Let the soap dry overnight (or longer) and pop them out carefully. The thicker the mold the longer it will take to set up, but the more sturdy. I broke a lot of mine since I used a shallow candy mold.

If you don't want to spend time grating soap, you can try the microwaved "soap cloud" which looks like a fun activity in and of itself. I saw it here at Our Best Bites. After the soap (Ivory only!) is microwaved, you crumble it and follow the rest of the steps above to turn it into molded soap. You can also use cookie cutters as molds, like Sara did. I will say the you want to be sure to rinse everything you used to make the soap very well before you put it in the dishwasher as you can have a big soap problem in your dishwasher if you put lots of really soapy stuff in there.

To the molded soaps I added some foam shapes for bath tub play. I think it's fun to have the soap match the foam shapes. So I went with jungle animal soap and Safari guy, ship, hut, etc. I had limited colors of foam to use for these, but you can see some of my other bath scene sets here and here.

Although I'm listing these as stocking stuffers, we actually gave these as little gifts for Thing One's friends a couple years ago. I just wanted something fun and simple. So I bagged up the foam set,

added the soap, and stapled a paper label over both bags.

And that's a wrap on good clean fun. 

Thanks for following along, with my handmade gifts series. Check back soon for my round up of handmade gift ideas. Have a great weekend!

- Haley