How to make a Wet Felted Soap-On-A-Rope.

Both my kids love the bath. They play in and with the water for ages. I love it because it is one place these days where they play happily together (yes, we have entered the stage of fighting)

One of the things that I find really sweet with their bath is that they wash each other. We decided to make a soap-on-a-rope.

We needed a bar of soap, sturdy yarn, warm soapy water and our wool supplies... roving and our needle felting needle. I get my wool supplies from Weir Dolls (www.weirdolls.com).

I tied the yarn around the soap as if the soap was 'brown paper packages tied up with strings'. K launched into 'Raindrops on Roses and whiskers on kittens...'
I made sure there was enough yarn left on the ends to make a loop for our rope part of the soap-on-a-rope and tied it into place.

This is what the yarn-wrapped soap looked like.

We made a hole in the wool roving for the yarn loop to fit through.

We threaded the yarn loop through the hole in the wool.

Then we wrapped the soap in the wool.

One strip of wool around one way like this...

Another strip of wool around the other way so that the soap was fully covered. It was important not to skimp on the wool as we didn't want any of the soap to show.

This is what our wrapped soap looked like...

Next, it was time for the warm soapy water. We dipped our wrapped soap into the water and started to gently massage the wool.

We massaged and massaged, very gently at first, so that the wool fibers slowly interlocked and the wool became tighter over the soap.

When we felt that the wool had started to felt together, we started to agitate the soapy wool soap with more vigor. The wool shrunk over the soap and the soap started to feel nice and snug over the soap.
Then we gave our soap-on-a-rope a nice rinse in fresh water and hung it up to dry.

Our bath tonight was even 'funner' than usual. The children took great pleasure in lathering up their woolen soap and scrubbing themselves clean.
They washed each other and themselves over and over again and I think they truly are the cleanest they've ever been!

Remember to pop over to Friday's Nature Table on Fridays to share your nature-inspired posts... everyone is encouraged to participate!

Blessings and magic.