Home & Garden Antiques & Arts & Crafts

Children Should Take Up Soap Making

Children will need a lot of activities wherein they could express themselves in different ways. It will greatly help in their development and learning as compared to just watching television most of the time. By doing things such as arts and crafts, they can have something productive to do as they are also learning at the same time.

The usual arts and crafts activities include painting or drawing. Others may also include woodworking especially for older kids. But if your child is tired of doing all of these usual activities, you may try suggesting soap making as a new hobby that they may try. This is a lot more interesting hobby and it may keep them busy for long periods of time.

In order to start out making soap, you will need to make the basic soap mixture which will serve as the template which you can design. You may make this from scratch by combining oil and lye and making them undergo saponification. This method is potentially dangerous as it involves handling lye, which is a very corrosive substance. If children are going to make soap, it might be a better idea to make use of glycerin soap.

Glycerin soap first needs to be melted before it can be used for designing. This can be done in a pan, or by simply putting it in the microwave. When your soap is in liquid form, you may proceed to adding dyes, fragrance oils and other ingredients that you can think of to help make your soap more appealing.

When you are satisfied with the ingredients that you have added in your soap mixture, it is now time to let it cool off and harden. You can choose different molds to give different shapes and sizes to the soap. You may also put in different soap mixtures in one mold and come up with an effect like 2 soaps in 1. Try different ideas with your child so that you can come up with a lot of unique designs.

Once the soap has become semi-hardened, you can take them out of the molds and use knives to further sculpt your soap and give it the shape that your child wants. You may need to supervise this closely as children holding knives may be a very dangerous combination.

The finished product will be great as a decoration in your bathroom, especially if you and your child made really excellent designs. You may also show these off to friends and relatives and even give them out as gifts. If your designs are not very good or if you made a mistake, this can still be used in the bathroom when taking as shower thus no mistakes will go to waste.

Soap making is also very practical as no final product goes to waste. If the design made was not very good, this can still be used for cleaning oneself in the bathroom. On the other hand, you can give these out as gifts or display them if the designs are good. This will encourage your child to practice a lot and perfect his technique until he is already adept at making different designs.

Leave a reply