Christmas gifts...

We worked on a couple gifts together last night; the supposedly  simple, easy projects will take me all week! The scratch off books idea I found here. First; I went to thrift stores and found cheap, colorful board books, $.50 each. Look inside of them, many were very ...non-colorful, lots of white and pastel colors.

 Coat the pages of a board book with tempera paint; as you can see each page needs multiple layers of

paint, the above has one. We did prop 2 of them up and got a single coat on all the layers, like this;

Barely looks painted. The idea is to create an 'easy' scratch off surface. One of the problems is the paint. The directions said to add a tablespoon of soap to paint. So you start with fairly thin paint then thin it further with the soap. This morning the residue in our bowl painted a much blacker coat. So I dumped the whole bottle to sit open and evaporate while I wait for each page to dry, so by the time I finish it'll be thick enough. Andrew's page was thick enough with one coat, but he took 45 minutes to lay the paint on very thickly;

Meanwhile Jeffrey was in charge of melting the soap base so we could 'make' soap for another gift. We have 2 molds; each take at about 40 minutes to make. Melt, pour, wait....dump, repeat. Most of the time is just waiting..

Easy but takes a bit of time. We made 2 large soaps and 3 small soaps last night...more to go. I will not have leftover soap base to store for ...years.

edted: the books did not work well.