Want to carve soap for fun? Northeastern students have a club for you
Don’t do this in the rain
Don’t do this in the rain, unless you want your hobby to lather up and melt.
But a duck, a leaf, a tooth – and even SpongeBob SquarePant’s sidekick Patrick – were in various stages of being scraped, flaked and lightly ground out of bars of bone-white Ivory brand soap on Northeastern University’s Boston campus one recent evening.
They don’t whittle. Ever.
It was this year’s inaugural meeting of the student-run Soap Carving Club. Its organizers and faculty advisor said that they can hardly find a mention of a similar club across the country.
The idea for the club is to practice hand-eye coordination and attention to detail and it’s open to any Northeastern student.
The club’s founder and president, Aaron Tran, 22, a pre-denistry senior from San Francisco, hustled for recruits at the student club fair on Sept. 8, the first day of school.
He stood at a table among tables from the Origami Club and the Dang! I Love Fossils club table – among hundreds set up so students could pop by and get information.
Tran hawked one simple idea – carve soap for fun.
On Sept. 23, students showed up in droves for the first meeting of the school year, with more than 60 of them cramming into a classroom to attend the club that began last year with just 12 participants. Extra chairs were swiped from a nearby study hall.
Tran was ready. He ordered a lot of soap, about 350 bars, at $9 for a pack of 12. He stood at the head of the class with a projector showing close-ups of his hand working a bar of soap with a scaler – a steel tool dentists use to plug dental fillings into cavities.
The first assignment was to make a star by first tracing out the pentagram on the broad side of the soap, opposite the product label.
They were taught to hold the dental instruments distributed to the group with the thumb and index finger as fulcrums. Then, using the tools they were shown how to peel off thin layers of the soap, always in the outward direction away from the body.
Neophytes and returning members started scraping away. Flakes and soap crumbs started piling up on the paper plates students had at their tables. Some star images began appearing in bas-relief, with various degrees of precision among the members.
At first the gaggle was attentive, but soon became boisterous. Some club members had their own ideas on what to make.
“Dude, they’re making teeth over here,” Brody McVay, 19, a sophomore in mechanical engineering from Norwell, Massachusetts, called to a friend who, for whatever reason, brought his takeout dinner to the club meeting.
McVay discovered that he sat at a table of mostly pre-dentistry students intent on precision replicas of pearly white chompers, including Wilson Wen, 19, a sophomore pre-dentistry student from Newton, Massachusetts.
Wen declared he was making a molar.
Forget the teeth, said McVay. The former Eagle Scout wanted to make a soap version of a Boy Scout’s pinewood derby race car.
“I’m an engineering student, I’ll get the wheels to work,” he said.
Dariella Joseph, 21, a health science senior from Boston, proclaimed, “I’m going to make a duck and keep it in my bathroom.” But her friends cautioned, it would melt there. She shot back that it would just shrink as she used it.
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Curren Thomas, 18, a microbiology student, had already made a thumb-sized skull, he proudly displayed at his place at the table. He said he had gotten a head start working on a small piece of soap in his dorm room in anticipation of the club’s first meeting.
Tran didn’t seem to mind too much that some of the group strayed from the assignment of making a star as he walked among the tables to give pointers.
He started the club so others could join him in practicing to make teeth and enjoy comradery as they worked.
He spoke of how he used to work with his hands, in his father’s shop, Horizon Auto Repair in the South Market area of San Francisco, doing electrical wiring on cars.
He came to Northeastern because he was attracted to its co-op program and has already completed two of them as a dental assistant in the California Bay Area.
He described working on an implant crown using a ratchet that reminded him of instruments he used in his father’s auto shop.
“That helped solidify my interest in dentistry,” he said.
After he practiced making teeth on his own using wax and cheap soap, Tran started making turtles and other critters. He thought this could appeal to anyone who wants to work with their hands.
The overwhelming response at his club’s first meeting certainly proved that. But it created one, hopefully dissolvable, obstacle.
“Well, we’re gonna need more soap,” Tran said.
