LEARN TO MAKE SOAP - Cold Pressed

Create @ Blackwattle by spending 5 hours with us for our Basic Cold Process Soap Making Workshop. The aim of this workshop is to arm you with enough theory and hands on practice to give you the confidence to continue to make soap at home. 

This 5.5 hour course will give the theoretical knowledge and practical skill to make your own cold-pressed soap at home. The class will be capped at 4 participants and will be taught by Jan Kates from Carwoola in rural SE NSW, owner of The Champagne Soapery. 

The class is kept to a maximum of 4 attendees so you are guaranteed to be able to have one on one learning. During the class, you will learn how to make soap using the cold process method. Discover how to work safely with lye, how to mix your ingredients and how to make pretty smelling soap. You'll have access to a wide array of high-quality ingredients, allowing you to customise your soap with delightful scents and beautiful colours. As you mix and pour your ingredients, you'll feel a sense of joy and creativity that comes from making something truly unique with your own hands.

During the workshop, everyone will make a basic batch of soap (6 small bars) and then following lunch, use an on-line tool to design your very own recipe that you will use to make an approximate 1 kilogram of soap in a loaf to take home. Please note: you will take your large loaf of soap home and cut it into bars the next day once it has saponified. 

The day is designed to be a safe and fun learning experience for everyone.

What to wear and bring:

• long sleeves top
• long pants
• closed toe shoes
• apron (soap making is a little messy)
  
• large cardboard box (at least 40cm long)
• an old towel
• a laundry basket for ease of carrying all your bits and pieces home

Workshop cost includes:

• comprehensive workshop notes
• all the soap ingredients needed for the workshop
• 2 types of moulds that you use during the workshop then get to keep them take home
• light lunch
• tea and coffee
• 10% off all purchases through the farm shop on the day.

Teacher: Jan Kates from Carwoola in rural SE NSW, owner of The Champagne Soapery. 

Time: 10.00am - 3.30pm

About Jan: I have been a soap maker for over 5 years and my teaching started when I took an interest in the science behind soap making. I have a background in food science after my first job as a laboratory technician in a cheese factory – more decades ago than I will admit to! So this really rekindled my interest in basic science and the similarity to cake baking wasn’t lost on me either. As it happens it also produces about the same amount of washing up that doesn’t fit in the dishwasher. Being creative, in any field, is a messy business! 

I have come to realise retirement is looming and the thought of not going to paid work every day was getting scary. Not being the stay at home type I decided I need to be self-employed by the time I enter retirement so I can choose when I work or not and soap making fits that bill perfectly. But soap making, and teaching is more to me than just my retirement plan. There is an edge of excitement and even trepidation with every batch I make because even with tried and true recipes and techniques there is always that panic filled moment when it looks like I may have misjudged the timing, or introduced a new ingredient that doesn’t act the way I anticipated. 

There is often a fine line between a great batch and a massive fail, referred to in soaping circles as “soap on a stick” when things get out of control too fast and the soap has solidified still in the bowl and you can’t even get the spatula out without a chisel. But when everything does go to plan – or is even better than the plan, the satisfaction is immeasurable. 

Soap making scratches that itch we creatives have to use really simple standard household and pantry items to produce something of high quality and functionality for ourselves and our families. It is something our great grandparents did as a matter of necessity that has since become a lost skill with the emergence of mass production of household consumables. The advantage that we have as modern soap makers that our forebears did not is a plethora of ingredient choices and access to scientific tools to avoid the oft mentioned horror stories of using Great Grandma’s dreaded “lye soap”.