July 4th Craft

The kids made mini flags to celebrate the 4th of July this week. How cute are they?!!

Hand Cookie Ornaments

How cute are these? I hope they make it home in one piece. The kids made these today for their holiday trees. They are sugar cookies in the shape of each child's hand. 

Have sneaky suspicion some may get nibbled on before finding a branch to hang from. 

Homemade Hand Kites

I made these hand kites over the weekend. What do you think?

I found the solid wood circles at the thrift store- a brand new 7-pk for .65 cents! I had no idea what I would use them for but I knew I had to have them. 

The number seven certainly was an inspiration, since I LOVE rainbow colors, it was an easy leap to imagine these as hand kites in all the rainbow colors. Fate? I think so. The next day I picked up some ribbon and within an hour I had a rainbow of pretty streamers for the kids. I decided to do 7 different colors rather than a full rainbow for each to help with color recognition. I could just hear them now- "I want the BLUE one, Ms. Wendy!"

So far the daycare kids, as well as Alex, love them. We've been using them for dancing and music, being birds and butterflies and anything else our imaginations can come up with. 

If you make these yourself, you do need to heat seal the ends of the ribbons. After having them for a few days the cats thought they were obviously meant for them and they were beginning to fray already. I used a candle flame and held the tip of each ribbon just barely away from it and it gently melted the end so it was sealed nicely and shouldn't fray again. 

I looked up the rings online and they sell for about $8 just for the rings, and the hand kites sell for $60 for a set of 10 on Etsy, or $7 for ONE. I really got a great deal finding these and doing them myself, and I can tell you they are EASY as pie to make. 

The biggest cost was the ribbon. If you sew a lot you probably already have an assortment of ribbon, and any kind of ribbon will do. I wanted something specific for colors, so even though I have ribbon I've been collecting from thrift stores and sales for months, I decided this time I needed to buy it new from the store. If I was just doing this for Alex, I might use what I had on hand and not care about the colors as much. The ribbon I got was from JoAnne's fabric store. It cost $2 for an 18 foot roll per color, so I paid a total of about $16 to make all 7 hand kites. Compared to the retail of about $60, I saved oodles and I like that it was made by me. 

Love them!  

Making Soap

Today we made soap with the daycare kids! One of my daycare moms had given us some leftover party favors several months ago, and I still had the bouncy balls left. I thought they'd be perfect for using in soap!

Here's how they turned out-

Aren't they super cute??!

Here's what we did...

I used 2 lbs of clear olive oil melt and pour soap (which I got NEW for $2 at a yard sale months ago!!), peppermint essential oil, and the bouncy balls, which were free (thank you Henriikka!). The only soap mold I had that the balls would fully fit in was the  large half round loaf mold I got in a big batch of molds for $1 at a thrift store last Winter, so all in all this project cost about $2.50. We had a small crew today, only 4 kids old enough to do this project, so I dividied the soap into 4 equal parts, which resulted in larger than usual bars, but that was fun, too! Soooo, since most everything I used was free or super cheap, or I already had it on hand, each soap bar ended up costing about 60 cents!!

To keep the round mold level and prevent rolling, I filled a cardboard box with rice and set the mold inside.

I poured the melted soap first, then set in the balls in a way that would let me slice them evenly. I used my finger to gently tap them until they were just barely submerged.

This is what it looked like in the mold after it had mostly set (turned over).

The melt and pour container said it should take 20-40 minutes for the soap to cool, but because this was a deeper mold it was still very warm on the bottom. I placed it over the air conditioning vent to cool it down the rest of the way. It took about an hour and a half total.

When it was all the way cool, I flipped it over and gently pushed. The soap came out easily. This is the loaf out of the mold. It's a little cloudy looking but not very much, and you can still see the details of the bouncy balls, which the kids loved. 

I didn't spray it with alcohol to get rid of bubbles, which is usually a step a professional soap maker would use. I imagine it would have been clearer if I'd done that part, but I had no alcohol on hand today so we skipped that step and it turned out great just the same! 

Here are the bars after they were sliced. I can't believe how great they turned out!

 I thought the balls might sink all the way to the bottom, but they were pretty light, and this particular mix and pour is a special suspension formula, so it probably helped keep these slightly afloat.

Bonus- when the kids use the soap enough to expose the balls, it will act as a natural scrubby when they wash their hands or take a bath. I can't wait to do more of these!