What is it about making everyday things into unexpected shapes that is so appealing? Square crackers: eh, that’s alright. Circus animal crackers: fun! Straight drinking straws: gets the job done. Twisty straws: fun! Chunks of breaded chicken: edible. Mickey Mouse-shaped nuggets: fun!
That’s the principle at work here. A bar of soap is purely functional. No fun to be had. But soap shaped like little popsicles: that’s funny.
This was a really easy project that Konik and I made for his cousin. We started with two bars of transparent glycerin soap. I couldn’t find uncolored soap, so I was hoping that the orangish-tinted soap we did find would take on more interesting colors. You can see our supplies: soap, a popsicle mold, popsicle sticks, and food coloring.
The hardest part of the whole project was getting the soap to melt. After I chopped it into smaller pieces, Konik loaded up my Pyrex measuring cup and I heated it in our little NuWave oven.
It took several minutes of cooking, stirring, cooking some more to get the entire batch liquified. In retrospect, this probably would have gone much quicker in a saucepan. I think the reason I chose the Pyrex cup was for ease of pouring, but the thing was so dang hot, that I had to do it instead of Konik anyways. The soap was surprisingly stubborn when it came to melting.
He was happy to drip food coloring into each little popsicle mold. Then we took a stick and stirred the coloring around. You can see that we didn’t always get it mixed through and that was due to all the contours and divots in our particular mold. If I were to do this again, I would choose a simpler mold.
The soap begins to harden fairly quickly. We had to hold the sticks steady and centered for just a minute before the soap had congealed enough to support them. Then we set the whole mold aside for a couple of hours to finish hardening all the way through. Aren’t they pretty?
Getting them out was a little tricky, again due to the shape of the molds. A few careful jabs with a table knife was enough to release them, though, and they looked none the worse for the wear. I don’t know why I didn’t get pictures of the finished project. I wrapped each soapsicle — or “pocksible” as Konik calls them — in cellophane tied with a ribbon so that they wouldn’t stick together.
Konik is a pretty good little crafting partner. He follows directions well and really tries his best. I’ll have to try to come up with more little crafts for us to do together throughout the year just to keep his crafty spirit alive!
Two Frogs and a Grasshopper 
I like them even better where the color didn’t mix in evenly. They look really cool! I wonder if you could have swirled two colors without them combining since they cooled so fast?
Probably! I bet you could make some really cool effects that way. Good idea!