A clean escape from the mundane

It used to be when I wanted to relax, I’d automatically reach for the Internet, the latest Netflix rental or a computer game.

Lately though, I’ve been inspired to make soap.

Soap making is a new hobby influenced by my childhood adventures at a computer superstore and my adventures browsing an online handmade goods marketplace called Etsy. 

As a child, my dad would often take me to Computer City — a huge store with aisles and aisles of computer supplies. The highlight of my trips were the chocolate 5.25-inch floppy disks the store sold, complete with a gold box and gold band.

I was amazed that chocolate could take such an awesome form. Of course, for a child, anything with chocolate looks awesome indeed.

With a sudden desire to relive my past, I decided to research if anyone sells chocolate floppy disks anymore. Sadly, I don’t think they do.

But during my excursion, I did find plenty of chocolate molds in the shapes of electronics, which brings me to my new hobby.

More than a year ago, I discovered Etsy as a place that sells plenty of handmade soap. For some reason, I am particularly concerned that my soap be as “pure” as possible. I get nervous at a soap made with multi-syllabic and funny sounding ingredients.

Thus, handmade soaps sold through Etsy caught my attention. I bought cold-process soap from a seller who made some wonderful “hippy” scents like Dragon’s Blood and Nag Champa.

But I’d never thought that I could someday make soap myself.

That is, until I discovered these molds and the melt-and-pour method of soap making. The method is an extremely simple way to try out a hobby without using lye. All I do is melt the soap base, add scents and colors, and pour the mixture into the molds.

So, there you have it.

My love of geeky things and a remembrance of the past combined to create DigitalSoaps.

I started making soaps in several “geeky clean” designs. A Playstation controller, iPod, cellphone, keyboard and remote control are some the designs I’ve molded into soap so far.

The biggest endeavor I took on was to create a 3-D chess set. It was a learning process trying to get two sides of a chess piece to stick together. The set is complete now and I don’t have plans to make another any time soon.

By the time this column comes out, I will most likely have created a pizza soap with soap toppings stored in a real pizza box, and a pizza hamburger.

To me, this hobby provides a ton of variety and the easiest clean up of all.

The best part is, if I ever get tired of making soap, I can whisper, as I turn on the faucet, “I wash my hands of you.”

Chrystal Doucette is the Columbia Basin Herald health and education reporter. Her soap creations looked so good, she was challenged to the old prison movie cliché of making a gun out of soap.