Doodle Crate Subscription Box Review & Coupon – Handmade Soap!

Of the several boxes within the KiwiCo family, Doodle Crate is the most likely to leave you with a keepable and displayable piece of art — or, in this case, consumable art!  Doodle Crate is a member of the KiwiCo family geared toward kids 9+.  It inspires young makers to learn new skills and gain creative confidence through craft and art projects by teaching them basic and intermediate techniques of a new artistic medium each month.

Though geared toward kids, Doodle Crate is gender neutral and also excellent for anyone (even adults) wanting a craft subscription.  In our experience, this is the best “arts and crafts” box for older kids, tweens, teens, and adults.

All the supplies for this month’s project:  handmade soaps!  Every crate comes with everything you need to complete the project (except for a few basic items from your home), as well as a booklet.  Doodle Crate tends to focus on a single craft and contains only what you’ll need for the project.

The booklet has excellent, textbook quality background on the subject matter of the project.  The booklet is loaded with high-quality pictures and illustrations to both give you ideas and help you along.  Doodle Crate is great at giving some perspective and inspiration for their projects.

The booklet walks through the project step-by-step in great detail.  Like may Doodle Crate projects, this one has some templates and project suggestions, but it also leaves room for a lot of creativity.

There are lots of pointers and helpful tips located throughout the booklet, and the designers are good at anticipating areas of potential confusion or difficulty, providing suggestions and work-arounds.

One of the great things about this subscription is the adjustable difficulty.  You can almost always simplify or complicate the project to your liking by adjusting the intricacy of your artwork to suit your mood and ability.

This project had instructions for making both simple, swirled soap, as well as more complicated layered and embedded composite soaps.

We like to read through the entire booklet before getting started.  There are usually several recommended approaches to a Doodle Crate project, so we check out all of them and select the ones that look like they are the most fun and an appropriate level of difficulty.

The kit included clear blocks of soap for dyeing and making clear or colored soap.  It also included some opaque blocks of soap and a mold for making embedded designs.

Making our swirl soap, we went a little crazy on the amount of dye we added due to an overzealous team of dropper operators.

Our simple swirl soap — the rich color ended up being very lovely (and the Crate came with plenty of dye).

We first made the embeds and then poured layers of clear and colored soap on top.  The silicone tray made removing completed soap blocks a breeze.

The final little project was making a soap stand so you can store it off the counter and out of its own puddle.  The craft was simply gluing dowels into the sides of the stand.

Our finished blocks of soap — we made an opaque embed in a clear block, opaque embed in a layered and textured block, a swirled block, and several small translucent and opaque embeds.

We had a great time making this project as a family.  The kids liked adding the dye and choosing their embeds to design the composite soap.  Adult help was needed for microwaving and pouring the hot soap, but the dyeing and un-molding the soap was suitable for the kids.  They will get to enjoy their soaps for many weeks, and we will get to enjoy having clean kids!

Visit Doodle Crate to subscribe or find out more!  Use this link to save 30% on your first month of Doodle Crate!  (or Kiwi Crate and the KiwiCo family subscriptions Tinker Crate and Koala Crate).