Tag: Workshop

A few weeks ago, I attended a soap-making activity with a few colleagues as part of our annual staff bonding.

Many of us were under the impression that we would learn how to make soap itself.

However, it turned out that it was a workshop on how to make your own custom-shaped soap bars. -_-”

It started out with everyone queuing for a cup full of melted soap base. You can purchase this melted soap base as a block or as a bag of flakes, which you melt using the double-boil method. I’m told you can’t just double-boil any random bar of soap. Commercial soaps cannot melt.

Anyway, after we received our cup full of melted soap, we proceeded to the next station. There, we were asked to add skin-safe colouring and some essential oils to give the soap a pleasant smell. There were lavender, lemon, and lemon grass oils.

Once we were done stirring, we were instructed to pour the liquid soap into any of the molds to get the desired shapes. These were ordinary chocolate and baking molds.

That’s pretty much it!

Now, we had to wait for the soap to solidify.

Many of us went for a second round, this time experimenting with making soaps with different layers of colours. To do that, we had to wait for the first layer in the mold to harden a little bit before we could add the next layer of melted soap.

After a long wait, it was time to remove the soap bars from the mold.

Thus far, the activity had been rather boring. But that soon changed to a period of intense excitement.

Who knew that removing soap bars from the mold could be so exciting?

The excitement came from seeing just how pretty the final product looked. It looked absolutely nothing like what we’ve seen in the earlier stages. Even the mold didn’t look that interesting in the beginning.

But it’s not just the pretty shapes that we got. The colours played a huge role in making the soap bars very pretty.

Here’s mine:

 

Here’s what my colleagues made:

 

 

Here’s the result of experimenting with two layers of colour:

 

They’re all so pretty!

Wow… Incredible. The unveiling part was really magical. Everyone’s just so amazed by the way the soap looked.

Here’s a look at the soaps we made:

 

 

We all agreed that these soaps would make great gifts for Christmas.

I was tempted to make some of these myself at home. But it turns out that the soap base isn’t cheap. As I mentioned earlier, you can’t just melt any random soap bar that you find from the supermarket. It has to be a certain type of soap base. To my horror, these soap base costs a bomb. I haven’t found a cheaper alternative yet.

Anyway, I went home to try it out. Turns out this organic soap was indeed very nice to use. It was very gentle on the skin and it was neither too drying nor too moisturising. Very nice.

It was fun.