I excitedly made my first batch of all natural soap recently.  It’s funny how it is the littlest things that can make me so very happy.  I have wanted to make soap for quite awhile, but wasn’t ready to take the plunge into using Lye.  So when I finally gained the courage to buy some and make soap I was very proud of myself.  Oh – and I was rewarded …

With packing peanuts!!!  I ordered Lye from a local(ish) soap making store and it arrived to me packed in packing peanuts.  Now I don’t do a lot of online shopping, but I don’t think packing peanuts are very common anymore – are they?  Terrible for the environment I’m sure – those these were “recycled” packing peanuts.  Anyways as soon as I opened the package I knew we had some cool crafts in our future.

I remember creating and building with packing peanuts when I was little – and I remembered doing it just with water.  Then I started to think about it logically and thought that was probably not a very accurate memory.  However, I decided to give it a try anyways – and it really worked!  Kinda …

The packing peanuts stuck together beautifully with water, but they did kind of get mushy, and shrunk a bit when drying – they certainly did not dry very sturdy.  But we are all about the process of crafting, creating, and building over here so that was fine by us.

We simply dipped the peanuts into some water and stuck them together.  It really is that easy.  The wet end kind of mushes, almost melting, onto the other peanut and stays put.

Since we are close to Halloween we created some monsters.  We tried to build some tall, which was a challenge.  Sam preferred to build them flat on some paper.  It was a really neat activity.

We decided to break out the paint, because this craft had very little mess in and of itself, and my little ones will not stand for that.  Ben, at the age of 2, took care of that with some blue and red paint.

Thought I would share this activity with you in case you happen to receive these fun packing peanuts in the mail.  It’s always nice to teach our little ones to reuse and recycle wasteful things.

I would love to not have to throw these packing peanuts in the garbage – any suggestions for other things to create with them?

Thank you for any suggestions – and for joining me here!

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