soap

(Sadly, this post does not have pictures, but you can just try to imagine it.) For my brother Jeff’s ninth birthday, the kids got him a bag full of stuff especially for him to demolish. It had 6 rolls of toilet paper, 3 bars of ivory soap, 1 box of tissues, 1 tube of toothpaste, and 1 can of shaving cream in it. He had a lot of fun with it, as you can imagine!

With the toilet paper, we wrapped Jeff and his friend up and they ran around until they broke free of their super-strong bonds (ha ha! ☺). We also wrapped each other to the tree and then broke free, and held the roll of toilet paper on the back of the 4-wheeler while driving it, which made the toilet paper stream out behind.

Jeff and his friend carved two bars of ivory soap (well, actually they cut it up into pieces instead of carving it), and the other one we exploded in the microwave. Have you ever done that? If you haven’t, you absolutely MUST DO IT. All you have to do is get a bar of Ivory soap from the store (I think ones that are the most recently bought are supposed to work best), and put it on a paper towel covered plate, and turn the microwave on for about a minute. If you watch through the window, you can see the soap puffing up into a huge cloud. It has a very interesting texture: even though it looks soft, it’s actually hard and sort of crumbly. (Note: You have to use Ivory soap for this, not just a random brand)

Anyway, back to the gifts. The tissues are just for pulling out because who doesn’t want to do that sort of thing, right?

The toothpaste was really cool. We took it outside and put it on a piece of cardboard (which later proved rather ineffective) and Jeff took off the lid of the tube and stomped on it really hard. The back of the tube burst open and the toothpaste squirted several feet away onto our, he he, porch door – *oops!* (Don’t worry, I wiped it up. Well, at least most of it ☺)

The shaving cream Jeff just squirted out all at once into a plastic tub and we had fun squishing it.

This was a fun and different sort of gift that left no toy behind that we had to try to fit into our stuffed toy cupboards. Do you know someone who would like to get a demolition-gift-package?

***Allison***

It’s amazing what you can do with an ordinary bar of Ivory soap. You can explode it, smash it, make it into dough, or even make — who would guess?– more soap?

The idea of exploding Ivory soap was from Pinterest, but I made up some more fun stuff to do with the puffed up soap.

The fun begins with exploding the soap. (Sorry, I don’t know why I didn’t take pictures of this, but if you search for it on Pinterest or the web, you can find lots of pictures.) Put a bar of Ivory soap on a plate covered with a paper towel. Stick it in the microwave for a couple of minutes. There’s not a certain time limit, just take it out when it stops growing.

Watch the soap through the microwave window. It is AMAZING! The soap starts exploding and pieces of puffed soap stick out of the original bar. (Argh! I really wish I got a picture of this!) Anyway, when the soap stops growing, take it out of the microwave. Be careful! It can get pretty hot. Admire it for a while it cools down. When it’s cool, go ahead and touch it. The soap looks puffy, but it’s actually pretty firm. After you’ve exploded the soap, you can stop right there and use it as you would a regular bar of soap, or you can keep going for more fun.

The next thing to do is to pound it into pieces. Spread out some sort of floor cover,(tablecloth, newspaper, etc.) take a small hammer, and pound it to smithereens!

When it is pretty much powder, you can make soap dough. To make white soap dough, add a small amount of shaving cream to the soap powder.

Mix it up with your hands. Experiment with adding more or less shaving cream. The dough is about right when you can squeeze once and it holds its shape, but crumbles when you squeeze it again.

You can make towers, balls, handprints, maybe even a sandcastle with this stuff.

If you would like to make your dough colored, add a few drops of food coloring to the shaving cream before mixing.

After you’re done playing with soap dough, you can mold the dough into pretty soaps.

You will probably need to add more shaving cream to your dough so it holds itself together better.

If anyone is messy from all this fun, no problem. Just take your newly made soap and wash up!

****************************Notes*********************************

I think Ivory soap explodes best if it is freshly bought from the store.

This is a great activity to do with kids, but it can get a little messy. Make sure to adequately cover your play space, and you should be fine. Have a blast!

***Allison***