Making soap is great! It's fun, it makes nice gifts and I love to use it myself! But if you are going to give this stuff as a gift, it's a bit nicer to have it wrapped in some manner rather than just handing off some naked bars to someone... Which I do frequently still, but none the less, I recognize that it may be nicer if it is wrapped. However, soap is stupid to wrap, it's not all that square (though with the mold it is better!), and the most realistic option is to wrap and label each bar... which means a lot of bars to wrap, and even if I do try to get the heart shaped or odd shaped bars wrapped, they are still pretty messy looking. Now I haven't figured out the solution to the weird bar shapes, however this year I am very happy with our wrapping efforts. (wow that's a long introduction, I must have a final to write or something). In the past, we have done the cigar bands (eh... ) I bought some old thin accounting paper from Scrap last year which was pretty good to use, but this year... I got the kids to do some bubble prints for the wrappers.
How to do bubble prints (I was too busy making prints to take pictures of the process sorry, but I liked it so much that I still want to write it down!):
- A lot of tempura paint (a few table spoons at least... stick with stronger colors)
- Shallow dish (not deeper than say a salsa container)
- a good strong squirt of dawn or other dish soap (when I need serious dish soap, I use blue dawn, for my dishes though I prefer the frou frou smells of mrs. meyers for every day).
- about 1-2" of water to cover.
Mix thoroughly
BLOW gently with the straw (only caveat is the reminder to BLOW not suck on the straw as they may do without thinking.... Owen).
Gentle blowing too, to make a nice tower of bubbles without overflowing your container.
Take your paper and just set it down on top of the bubbles.
These make cool prints at the very least. They dried quickly and were ready to use minutes after we were done. More to the point of this post is that they make perfect wrappers for soap! Get-it... bubbles... soap... They turned out much nicer looking than I hoped, really more of a marbled effect.
Fun for the kids, fun for me too... does end up being a little splattery, but not terrible if you don't go all crazy on the bubble blowing. Clean-up went well, probably because of all the soap!
(pictures soon... or really you will probably just get a bar of soap!)
AAnd just because I have them here and am remembering to post them. Mom made G. this amazing grey awesome flannel dress/jacket (gets used as both) and we both LOVE it! It looks so good on her and the flannel is so wonderful that I bought some (similar) for a shirt for myself and an orange colorway for a robe for Owen!
For whatever reason I don't have a great picture of Grace's Christmas Dress, but I did make it, our of a red velvet that hides many errors (the hem and zipper are a bit wonky), but it is so cute on her, and turned out really nicely (and she wore it every christmassy opportunity)
