Homemade Bath Crayons

Ingredients:

• 1 bar Ivory soap
• Warm water
• Food coloring

Instructions:

1. Grate the bar of soap. You’ll need about 1 cup of soap shavings. I use Ivory because it’s very mild.  Unfortunately, there isn’t a short cut to the grating, unless you use a food processor. You can’t use detergent or powdered soap. They’re too harsh.
2. Add food coloring and warm water, a few tablespoons at a time, to the soap shavings and mix until it forms a thick dough. You can add more water or soap shavings to get the right consistency.
3. Once the dough is firm, you can shape it into crayons by hand or press it into candy molds. I made ours into little cigars so that they’d be easy for little hands to handle.
4. At this point, you can leave the crayons out to dry and harden. 

Notes:

• You probably want to test the crayons on your bathtub and other surfaces before you unleash the children with them. Make sure they rinse off.
• I found some neon food coloring at my grocery store that is splendid. I love it.
• If you want to make your crayons different colors (as opposed to all one color as in the instructions above), you can separate the soap shavings into smaller chunks, and mix each with water and food coloring to get the right consistency.
• If you’re interested, you can get real crayon-shaped molds at the craft store.