Soap, soap, who's got the soap?

I'm going to just tell you all right now that I SUCK at photography. So these pictures and any others I post won't be the best. For the record, I've taken at least four classes in photography led by professional photographers. The bottom line is that I just suck so you can save your tips.

Now, to the point of this post. The girls and I need structure with our "free time" or we wind up pretty cranky. Not too structured or scheduled, just kind of a rough guideline. As I was working on the summer schedule I included "creative time." I believe in the importance of creating things. Honestly, I think that's one of our main purposes in life. But we're not all talented in the same ways so I didn't want to be any more specific than that. I figured we could pursue our creative time individually or together in whatever way struck anybody's fancy. Given the very different nature of my girls, I expected that creative time would end up naturally being more individual, but yesterday they surprised me. As soon as I brought up that creative time was approaching they said, nearly in unison, "Let's make soap!" So we did. Here's the result along with some observations and comments.

Above and to the left is Mindie's effort. She started out grabbing a tray mold of purses, flip flops, and other "girl stuff" but after a few seconds, traded it in for the standard rounded bar mold. It's hard to tell in the picture, but it's a marble design of peach and yellow. She said she wanted to make tie dye soap but couldn't remember how the instructions said to do it (this mom throws away directions for creative things - how is it creative if you're following someone else's directions??). Obviously, she figured it out - sort of. I have a feeling next time the soap comes out, she's going to be refining that technique.

These floral soaps (scented with Shannen's favorite Japanese Lotus Blossom) were Shan's contribution to the effort. She started out making single color soaps but after watching Mindie and I a big, did a pair of two-color soaps. I really love the yellow and lavender one. The picture is bad but the inner part of the rose is lavender while the outer petals are yellow. As the girls would say, "Sooooo kawaiiiiiiiii!" (roughly "so cute" in Japanese, but there's a nuance there that I'm not sure I could explain).

And finally my work, because moms need to be creative too. You can barely see in the background the clear green frog. It's eerily realistic looking and very slippery when you wash your hands with it, just like the real thing. Up front is the turtle. I wanted him to have an opaque shell but a translucent body. It's kind of sloppy but not bad. The big downside is that I feel like I'm "dirtying" my hands instead of cleaning them.