Soap Carving - Art for Children and Adults

Soap carving is a fun and safe art for children as well as adults. You can get started easily and inexpensively. For the price of a bar of soap and a simple tool like a plastic knife you or your child can learn to carve.

When someone gets interested in soap carving the first questions they generally have are, "What type of soap should I use?" and, "What is the best tool to use?" Ivory is a popular soap for carving, but others will work as well. You can experiment with different brands and colors to learn how they carve and look. My very first soap carving was a green sheep. I don't even remember the soap brand, but I do remember proudly displaying my carving on a shelf for my parents.

Be sure to use a fresh bar of soap rather than an old dried out bar of soap. A dry bar is brittle and is more likely to crumble and break when you carve it. It hardens when it dries and then it takes more force to cut into it. When you use more force you are also more likely to break a chunk off.

Although a plastic knife is often used by beginning soap carvers, other tools can work better. A Popsicle stick can be shaped and sharpened along its long edge like a knife blade or on its end like a chisel. For finer work a sharp pencil works great.

For children, simple animals and fish are excellent projects. Teddy bears, snowmen, hearts and turtles all are popular. Once you have chosen the project draw a simple outline on one side of the bar of soap and slowly shave away the edge of the soap bar until it is shaped like the outline. Then begin rounding the edges until it looks good to you. Once you have it shaped, it may still have rough edges and little crumbled shavings on it. A good way to clean it up is to dip your finger in water and then gently rub all over your carving. This will make it smooth and clean looking.