Natural Felted Soap -Easy DIY Gift

Looking for a gift idea to give your daycare parents? Parents enjoy receiving a beautiful gift their child made with their own hands.

Here’s a gift that even a two year old can make with success. Hand Felted Soap can be useful for anyone, it’s an exfoliating wash cloth and bar of soap in one!

Natural wool fibers are anti-fungal and anti-bacterial. The wool fibers cover a bar of soap to extend the life of the soap.

This simple gift is reasonably quick to make and filled with soapy tactile fun for your daycare children.

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Materials:

Natural wool roving  

Bar of soap

Dish soap

Towel

Tap with hot water

Bubble wrap or bamboo sushi mat (if desired)

We chose a few organic bars of soap and found the smaller goat’s milk bar (brown one) was the easiest to manage for small hands. The other bars were thicker and therefore harder to felt for the children.

I used a vegetable peeler to shave off the corners of the goat’s milk bar.  This will help prevent any bald edges as we felt.

The children selected the colours of felt they wanted for their bars of soap.  They laid out the first colour and wrapped the wool around the bar.

Use enough wool to at least wrap the bar around twice. The amount of wool you use is up to you.

If you plan on needle felting a design or initials on the bar once you have finished then a thicker wool covering is advantageous. Here is the bar tightly wrapped.

Choose another length of wool to wrap your bar in the opposite direction. This will cover the top and the bottom ends. We switched colours for fun.

We then added thin strips of wool in a haphazard wrapping technique. The end result will display the different colours nicely.

Your wool bar will be very full and fluffy at this point.  That is perfect.

Add as many colours or layers as you wish.

Next step involves some hot water. Run the tap water as hot as you can safely stand it and dunk the whole wool bar under the stream of water.

Make sure the wool is completely saturated.

Add a few squirts of dish soap directly on your wet wool and start to gently work the wool.  Demonstrate to the children how to gently squeeze and rub the wool bar in your hands. As you massage the wool, the dish soap with start to lather.

The wool fibers need agitation to bind together. Gently rubbing the bar in your hands or using a corrugated surface will stick the pieces of wool together.

This is when you could use the bubble wrap or sushi mat. Simply rub the bar of wool across the mat in several different directions.

Working the wool to get it to bind together takes about 12 minutes.

The children loved the feeling of the soapy wool in their hands.

Every few minutes rinse off the extra soap lather under hot water. The hot water works to mold the wool fibers together as well.

If needed, add another squirt of dish soap. Rub and massage the bar of wool in your hands as you would if you were lathering up a normal bar of soap.

Keep working the wool for a full 12 minutes or until you feel the wool getting packed down. You will feel the wool bind together in a dense covering around the bar of soap.

Sometimes small strands of wool will bind together but won’t stick to the bar. Keep working them and know that if they don’t end up binding after the 12 minutes you can simply snip that one strand off.

You won’t be able to tell where the strand was cut off.

Rinse the wool bar under tap water to get rid of the excess soap lather. Pat dry in a towel and then leave the soap bar to air dry for several hours.

Once the felted bar feels dry to the touch it’s finished. You could needle felt a design or initial onto the finished felted soap if you desire.

The children felt their bars were perfect as is.

Congratulations on felting your first bar of soap.  I’m sure it turned out lovely and your daycare mothers will be delighted to receive such a thoughtful gift this holiday season.

Jana