Soap Making Class
Between now and Christmas I’m teaching a different workshop each weekend. This weekend’s class (Sat 12 November) was soap making. I ran it through City of York Council so they handled the bookings side of things and provided the teaching space, a cookery room in Huntington School.
Every learner had a hob and work space. In each workspace I’d set out moulds and equipment and in the centre of the room I set up a station where everyone could come and collect their clear or opaque soap base, drops of cosmetic dye and fragrance oil and the other ingredients required to make their five soaps:
Honey, oat and cocoa butter Hidden toy soap Macchiato soap (i.e. posh coffee soap) Exfoliating Lemon and poppyseed Carved design soap
Once the 12 attendees had arrived, signed in, unpacked the pans etc that I’d asked them to bring we got straight to it. The plan was for everyone to make 5 different soaps over the course of the day and as well as demonstrations, I gave everyone an instruction booklet with recipes for the five soaps.
The day progressed beautifully with plenty of demo time but far more actual ‘making’ time for the learners, lots of questions, lots of chatting and most importantly, lots of fun soaps created. As I’d hoped, everyone completed each of the five soaps mentioned above, following the recipes but also adding their own creative touches with their choice of colour and fragrance. In most cases, folk had time to make an extra couple of soaps too, either whole soaps or wee ‘soap gems’ that use up extra melted soap and are set in shaped ice cube trays (Great stocking fillers!) In the final 45 minutes or so while the last soap was setting everyone congregated at the ‘packaging station’ where I’d set up gift tags, collage materials and cellophane bags for them to create labels to finish off their soapy creations.
It was a lovely day and an absolutely brilliant group of really enthusiastic, eager and creative learners. I’m looking forward to seeing a couple of them again in my candle making class in a fortnight’s time.
And following on from this session, I’ll be running more soap making with CYC next year. 2017's sessions will have a more botanical theme with five delicious soaps with lovely dried fruit, seeds and flowers incorporated. The dates will be Saturday 25th March 2017 and Saturday 20th May.
Once booking is open, it will be through the www.yortime.org.uk website.
If you'd like to see my current list of upcoming workshops, they can be seen by clicking here.
