Entries by tag: about me
[Unknown LJ tag]asked me to ramble about, "a craft you'd love to get into, but won't because of time, expense, fear of failure, etc"
Cold Process soap. Cold process is the 'old school', Little House on the Prairie, type soap. The stuff that uses lye.
Which is why I haven't even thought about doing it. When you play with lye you need to be outside, or at least somewhere with MASSIVE ventilation, which I really don't have access to. You also have to let the bars cure for *weeks*. And I don't have the storage space for a whole bunch of ten-pound soap molds. (And 'ten-pound soap mold' doesn't mean the mold itself weighs ten pounds - it means it holds ten pounds of soap solution. Now add the heavy wooden mold to that.)
But someday I'd love to give it a go. For some reason, cold process soapers are seen as 'more legitimate' soapers than us M&P folks. When I told someone at Craft Bar that I was teaching soaping the next month she actually turned up her nose when I said it was melt and pour and said, "I can't be bothered with that silly sort of thing. If you were doing lye-soaping then it would be worth coming out for." Well, excuuuuuse me!
Not that I don't love the stuff I do. With cold process you have to decide what colors and scent your slab will be and then hope your customers want that. And a lot of that. I kind of love doing things on demand. I know I'm making exactly what the customer wants and I'm not going to be staring at these bazillion soap bars I thought would be awesome, but don't sell, for the next ten years.
If anyone still wants to drop me topics to ramble about, you can add them here on LJ or here on DW.
Cold Process soap. Cold process is the 'old school', Little House on the Prairie, type soap. The stuff that uses lye.
Which is why I haven't even thought about doing it. When you play with lye you need to be outside, or at least somewhere with MASSIVE ventilation, which I really don't have access to. You also have to let the bars cure for *weeks*. And I don't have the storage space for a whole bunch of ten-pound soap molds. (And 'ten-pound soap mold' doesn't mean the mold itself weighs ten pounds - it means it holds ten pounds of soap solution. Now add the heavy wooden mold to that.)
But someday I'd love to give it a go. For some reason, cold process soapers are seen as 'more legitimate' soapers than us M&P folks. When I told someone at Craft Bar that I was teaching soaping the next month she actually turned up her nose when I said it was melt and pour and said, "I can't be bothered with that silly sort of thing. If you were doing lye-soaping then it would be worth coming out for." Well, excuuuuuse me!
Not that I don't love the stuff I do. With cold process you have to decide what colors and scent your slab will be and then hope your customers want that. And a lot of that. I kind of love doing things on demand. I know I'm making exactly what the customer wants and I'm not going to be staring at these bazillion soap bars I thought would be awesome, but don't sell, for the next ten years.
If anyone still wants to drop me topics to ramble about, you can add them here on LJ or here on DW.
I'm seeing a lot of people doing the "give me a month's worth of topics and I'll answer one of them each day" meme and although it looks like fun, and I will try to answer one of them each day. (I reserve the right to skip questions that do not inspire me or skip days because my schedule is psychotic.) Leave topics on DW or LJ, I'll cross post to both.
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