Calling All Artists, or More than You Ever Wanted to Know On the Subject of Soap Molds

Can you carve? Do you sculpt? Are you a fair hand with clay? Wild Heaven Farm is looking for a sculptor to carve the plug/positive for our new soap molds and it pays in goat milk soap and skin care products.

Soap molds look like large chocolate molds, making between two and five bars per sheet. If you're making a few batches a year for your own use or for gifts, they work perfectly well. If you need to make more than your own body weight in soap each week to stay in business, ladeling molten soap into each individual mold is time consuming. The molds we have now are nice enough. In fact, our shaped bars are part of our claim to fame. But we need new molds. Why? Because I'm hard on them. Like most of my equipment and my beleaguered van, I demand a lot from them. Since I can't wait for soap to decide to come out of the mold on its own, I pop them in the freezer for a bit. Add the pressure I put on each cavity to un-mold the soaps and times the number of days I make soap in a year and you've got a lot of structural fatigue.

Rather than give up and do flat slab bars like a lot of savoniers (and far be it for me to impugn the nature of your trade or profession), we prefer shapes. So if we're going to be making our own molds, why not use our own shape.

Isn't it cute? :)

The plan was conceived for large, tray-style custom molds. Not only would these molds lend themselves to better "branding", they will last longer than the plastic ones and allow me to make more soap per batch, meaning more soap per hour of my surprisingly limited day.

Having a custom mold made by a company that trades in such things really runs into money. To make it cost effective, you have to be willing and able to purchase several dozen. That means an outlay of about a thousand dollars, for starters. Ouch. No es bueno. So we're going to make our own silicone molds. I've worked with silicone before; it's fun and pretty easy. Mix blue bottle of goop A with magenta bottle of goop B, stir until your arm is burning, and pour around the "plug", the item you want your mold to duplicate.

But there's the rub - no plug. While I can milk a goat like it's nobody's business, I was not blessed with anything remotely resembling artistic skills. That's where you come in. The plan is to make silicone or rubber molds with a simplified version of our logo (above). We need a local artist or artistic-type person to make us a clay (or whatever medium) representation of this image. The job pays in soaps and skin care products. Nothing like a good ol' fashioned barter.

If you're interested, drop us a line at wildheavenfarm@yahoo.com with the dollar value of product you'd like in exchange if your "plug" is chosen and the amount of product you think is fair if you make one but its not used.

If you're, like me, not an artist, but you know one, please, please, please pass this on or direct them to our Facebook page.

Bye-bye and buy bars.