Soapin' you'll be my Valentine

Hi all!

Katie Gehring here, taking a break from Cupid's sweatshop workshop to share the Valentine's we created this weekend for the girls' classes. While I am all for chocolate and other yummy treats this time of year and will be sending in sweet treats for the parties, but times 24, it gets to be a little much. This year, I thought we'd try something different for the take-home treat, giving heart-shaped  soap. And yes, I am totally fine with being that mom who gave her kids' classes soap. :)

First step was to make the soap.  I found a great tutorial here, and used my heart ice cube tray from IKEA as molds for the soap.

Before we poured the melted soap into the molds, we put a pinch of tissue paper confetti in each heart, and then allowed time for the soap to set up.  20 minutes later, the soaps were done. 

I have to say that they turned out pretty cute, and they were E-A-S-Y to make.  The silicone IKEA ice cube trays were great molds and were perfectly suited for soap making, unlike last year's disastrous attempt at making brownie pops which may have resulted in the trays melting onto my oven racks...  

So, next I needed a super cute tag to accompany the little bags of soap, so I turned to my Neat and Tangled sets: Party Dots, Elves at Work and My Heart Sings. 

First up, I stamped the large dot circle onto thin pink cardstock and die cut the circle using the 2.5" circle die from Spellbinders. I thought this image looked like soapy bubbles. 

Next, I needed to print my pun-tastic sentiment onto the tags because I love a good pun like macaroni loves powdered cheese sauce. 

I wanted to print the sentiment onto the stamped tags because I was concerned that stamping on top of the printed sentiment would cause the ink to bleed. I set up a document in microsoft word and created a series of circles, slightly larger than the tags. 

Next, I created a text box and typed my sentiment inside each circle.  The font I used is called The Only Exception and can be downloaded here.  Next, I clicked print.  Using temporary adhesive, I attached the stamped tags to the printed template and ran the page through my printer again. 

I stamped the little boat from Elves at Work and the hearts from My Heart Sings onto the tag. 

I removed the tag from the paper, rubbed off a bit to adhesive residue and had the girls sign their names to the back of each tag. Then I attached the tag to the bag of soap with a bit of baker's twine: 

Just think, only 39 more to go!  I better head back to the sweatshop workshop before Cupid notices I have gone missing. Hope you have some good clean fun planned for this Valentine's Day!

Katie

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