Advent Activity--Day 14--Handmade Soap

For our 14th Advent activity my oldest son and I made soap. I had purchased the supplies at Hobby Lobby way back in the summertime. I couldn't find any really good directions, but I just followed the ones on the package of soap chunks. I've wanted to try this for quite a while. I thought the soaps would make nice gifts for some people on our gift list.



The photo above shows our supplies. I bought the opaque type of glycerin soap. You can also get clear. I also bought a mold for rectangle shaped bars, three little bottles of various scents: lemon verbena, wild berries, and green apple, and a package with red, yellow and blue dye. The scents and dye are both made especially for use in soap-making.



The first step was to melt to soap chunks. The package said you could do this in the microwave or on the stove. We did microwave. You just heat it in 30 second increments until it's melted. We started with three chunks (only 2 shown here) and it took about 90 seconds to melt them.



Here is how the soap looked when it was melted.



My oldest son squirted in the dye and the scents for each soap. We did them all different.

Once you have all the soaps mixed and poured, you just leave them for about an hour and then pop them out of the molds. That's it!!

Here are our finished bars of soap ready to be packaged and given to some stinky and special people on our gift list. (I'm just kidding about the stinky part; that's just my sense of humor!!)

This was a really easy project. I am sure we'll experiment with it again. We have some soap chunks left over. It took about 3 chunks of melted soap to make each bar. And the bars are the size of a standard bar of soap.