Nerdy Girl Nidelva Soapmakers & Crafts: kid's soap

Soap Volcanos of Nightmares

As mentioned in my last post, the volcano deserves its own blog entry.

The making of the Newton Soap Volcano:

Helping the children's TV science show, Newton, with their soap episode was fun. The volcano can be seen at 7:57 (you can also see Nidelva Såpekokeri in the credits at 27:54) They asked loads of questions, I demonstrated soapmaking for them and when they finally wrote their episode to include a nightmare sequence with a volcano bubbling over (soapmakers know of this phenomenon) they asked me if I could make them one. I had to try. It sounded like it was going to be very fun to try, even if it didn't work out. I decided it had to be recycled and reusable, so it had to be made out of real soap.

I had several kilos of goat milk soap sitting in storage that I knew I could shred down and recook (a method called re-batching). I had never sculpted anything with soap before, but I knew what the texture was like during rebatching and it turned out to be a rather fun medium to sculpt in. It was hot, but with rubber gloves on, it was comfortable enough to handle.

I put two small plastic containers upside down, smaller one on top of the larger one and covered them in a plastic bag and then covered that with a layer of rebatched, jasmine scented, goat milk soap. At this stage, I wasn't sure if I was going to try to remove the plastic containers or not. What I ended up doing was cutting the botton of the top container, giving me a nice, manageable space to put a decent volume of my 'lava mix' into.

The soap stayed malleable long enough to shape and held together very much like a sticky wax.

I wanted the lava mix to be a bath and body product too, not just baking soda and vinegar, like the kids do at science fairs. My answer? Bath bomb. Citric acid for the low pH and baking soda for the high pH. I tested the bath bomb mixture in a cup and added plenty of red food colouring but found the bubbles lacking so I squirted in some dish soap and got bubbles-a-plenty. It wasn't something I would put in my bath tub, but it worked.

The first layer of soap over the
plastic containers.

Building up the base of the volcano,
giving it shape.

The top cut open for the lava mix to be poured into.

A closer look at the sculpting and design

I giggled the whole time I was making this. It seems perfectly surreal, but I guess that was the idea. It was for Solveig's dream sequence. It ended up weighing in at 3.7kg and it was 26cm tall.

The whole, 'make a soap volcano' also led to these little beauties: Chocolate scented melt and pour soap with and adjusted formula for the lava to make it very skin friendly.