The Sojourn in Egypt Part III, or, It's a Wrap!

We didn't actually do everything I had thought we might, but we did food. We made flat bread (but didn't put sand in it, I was thinking of it for authenticity...) and date-honey candy (yum!).

We skipped the costumes, but then, a lot of Egyptians at the time skipped the costumes, too.

We made cat statues! Paper mache around water bottles. That was fun!

We made shabti (small statues buried with the dead to do all their manual labor in the after life) out of grated soap. You grate the soap (we used Ivory), wet your hands and then mold the soap. After it hardens a bit, you can carve the details. I couldn't quite get the camera to show the details on ours. Actual shabti are sort of plain and mummy like also.

We really liked the grated soap thing - it lends itself to all sorts of sculpturing possibilities! Alas, I used my food processor to grate the soap and it was really tough to clean out and tossing it into the dish washer was not the right move. Unless you like your dishwasher to foam at the mouth.

On the plus side, unlike most craft projects, they can be recycled as soap!

The Grand Plan called for a fabulous finish: A play in which one of the Zoomlians was mummified. This would use the outfits we didn't do, and tie everything together in a memorable way which demonstrated their thorough grasp of the subject.

But we got distracted, so we're just going to wrap all the kids in toilet paper and call it a day.