I arrived in San Francisco on Friday at noon, and call Kai (my assistant for Maker Faire) to see if he wants to go for lunch. By the time I get to the car rental place, it was 2:00pm! I couldn’t remember the name of the restaurant, so I looked up Green Apple Books, drove there and walked a block to Burma Superstar. I ordered Samosa Soup and then my food poisoning from the plane kicked in. Kai put me to bed and after a few hour nap (I had been traveling since 4am that morning – flying directly from Burlington, VT after attending the Handcrafted Soapmakers Guild Conference). Thankfully it was a short bout of food poisoning and I was able to eat after my nap. Then we made our way to our host for the weekend and we went to Moshi Moshi for dinner.
For Maker Faire, we were going to be making melt & pour soap, and to make one bar at a time a microwave is ideal. I asked my host if I could borrow his, and he said that would be fine… I guess I didn’t really explain my need… (his microwave is bolted into his kitchen) so I ended up buying a microwave on the way to Maker Faire and arrived 10 minutes before it started!
After getting setting up people started streaming into my booth pretty much non-stop to create their own soap. I had no time to train my assistant or eat! He fed me while I chopped and melted soap. Many people made soap – we used up a 24-pound block and a few 2 lb trays of soap – over 100 people made their own custom soap in my booth! They got to pick a mold – round, oval, floral oval, bee and honeycomb and rectangles were the choices, a toy (or toys, one kid fit 6 toys in their soap – a butterfly, army man, horse, goat, dinosaur and ballerina), colorant, glitter, and fragrance!
Maker Faire added a Saturday night portion to the event, so after the sun went down we closed up the booth and wandered around. We had some delicious Oysters Rockefeller on the grill, and while we were wolfing them down people from Brittany Knitting Needles were also at the booth slurping down oysters. They had some needles they were passing out and I scored a wooden pair of 19’s! I can’t wait to use them with some chunky yarn! We got out of there pretty late, so we ended up eating wonderful Clam Soup at the Clamhouse in San Mateo.
On Sunday Kai was totally trained to show people how to make soap. We had an assembly line system going with chopped soap ready to go in paper cups that corresponded to the mold sizes, and we got to explore maker faire for 30 minutes at the end of the day. I went straight to Bizzare Bazaar and met Tammy from RoxyCraft.com, Kathy Cano-Murillo craftychica.com, Starving Artist Bazaar. Jenni from Hambones and Jennicakes stopped by my booth as I was breaking down and I am now a proud owner of one of her infamous sleep masks – mine reads ” hung over”!
The Everything Soapmaking Book