Kai Projects: Carefree Crafts Day

When I initially signed up for a monthly craft subscription, I tried three different companies. We continue to get my favorite, Carefree Crafts. When Kai was home every day, we had to ration the projects with other homemade projects. But with Kai starting daycare, spending more time with Maurico, and finding favorite homemade crafts, we've fallen behind. We spent today binging on Carefree Crafts.

Here is Kai, wearing an old Carefree Craft we had to move to make room on our drying rack downstairs:

We started with a homemade craft - an oil and water mixture with glitter and food coloring:

Then our first Carefree Craft, from the December package, Kai is stringing buttons on a pipe cleaner to make a candy came ornament (You may notice the gingerbread houses in the background, a sure sign that we are a bit behind on cleaning up our craft area.):

Next, a waterless "snow globe" ornament:

After we woke up from naps, we moved into the January, winter wonderland, package. We made this handy penguin ruler for measuring snow...too bad we don't get snow here:

Here, Kai looks thrilled showing off the chalkboard sled and the ruler again:

We made snowflakes from coffee filters, markers, and water (still folded up in this picture):

Here, a snowman coaster:

And finally, a mitten window hanging:

The worst part? There were more crafts today that I didn't get decent pictures of. It was a craft filled day. 

Bath Bombs

Courtney and I made bath bombs last night. She bought some at LUSH - Kai, Courtney and I all enjoy them. The recipe here looked easy, so we tried a variation of that recipe. I ordered an enormous bag of citric acid from Amazon (10 pounds, we will either be making a ton of bath bombs or Kai and I will be doing some interesting "experiments").

When I gathered the ingredients last night, Bryce was skeptical of my intentions. When I got out the wonderful tare weight scale Craig got me, Bryce decided I was making "blue candy" and I decided he's been watching far too much "Breaking Bad." The rather interesting thing about using a scale was that I dumped the 1 pound box of baking soda into the bowl and discovered that the box actually had 17.5 ounces baking soda. I adjusted the recipe accordingly to keep the proportions the same.

We mixed 17.5 ounces baking soda, 8.75 ounces citric acid, 8.75 ounces of Episom salts and 8.75 ounces corn starch in a big bowl. As Courtney whisked the dry ingredients, I squirted scented baby oil in until we had a consistency we thought would work (this seemed easier than finding essential oils and other bath oils...but it also resulted in extremely oily bath bombs...we have plans for more experimentation on this part of the process). We used old plastic Easter eggs as molds, filling only the larger side and popping them out as we went. As you'll see in the picture, we added food coloring for about half of them.

I took a bath with two last night - the fizz didn't last long and the water became extremely oily. We will explore different oils and maybe adding water (I'm wary of water because whenever Kai and I use it in our "experiments" using this same reaction, we have trouble adding small enough amounts).

Because I'm not in love with this batch of bath bombs, I let Kai play with several in her bath today. The shape of the bath bombs sparked a great deal of imagination play. She cracked an "egg" (one of the white bath bombs) into the bowl where she was making pancake batter and chopped up a "tomato" nearby:

After she added the purple bath bomb to her batter she added a bit of water:

She had a great time playing with the bath bombs, but I told her next time we would have to do these experiments outside. She and the bathtub were so oily I had to put her in the shower when we finished. I think we could make different colored "bombs" and have fun outside outside with a squirt bottle of water, bowls, and the like.