On New Year’s Eve, I was going to go to a First Night event, but the friend I would have been staying over with was kind of lukewarm on the idea (she was not completely healthy), and I had just gotten back the day before from my long holiday trip, so I wasn’t so up for going out anyway. I decided to stay home and craft in the New Year. At some point in the afternoon I had the idea to complete ten projects by midnight, like the last ten seconds’ countdown. I didn’t expect to do everything from scratch, though as it turned out I did all but #1 from scratch. Also, except for the flowers used in #7, I didn’t buy anything new for the projects. Here’s the Craft Countdown list:
1. Ulu knife sheath
2. Vermont soap
3. Business card holder
4. Trio of “paint card notepads”
5. Trio of bookmarks
6. Lowly Worm
7. Flower decoration
8. Memo pad case
9. Robot iron-ons
10. Denim coaster
Since work will be busy through March and I’d like to avoid a replay of the baby sloth episode (though baby sloths are well worth the bandwidth), I’ll post individual entries for each of these, spread out with other entries. Today, item #2!
I stopped in a La Quinta on my drive back from the Midwest to New England, and they had lovely orange-scented soap. The only problems with it were that it was small, as one would expect, and also kind of hard. No problem; I’ve solved that before. This time, in addition to water, I drizzled in some orange-scented bath gel (I like citrus scented bath products). And then I decided to get fancy with the shaping, and dug out a cookie cutter. I am ridiculously tickled by the result:
As before, I diced up the soap fairly fine but not perfectly (it was two La Quinta bars), threw it in a bowl with water and bath gel, and microwaved it to melt/dissolve it. I was a little subtler with the heating this time, doing shorter stints, and I think that helped. Then I put the cookie cutter on waxed paper and used a rubber spatula to scoop and press the soap into it. I left it for several hours to cool and solidify, and then was able to press it out by hand.