Soap Cake

In The New Electric Ballroom, the script calls for a beautiful coffee cake to get smashed every night of the show. I was looking for a way to do that cheaply without having to bake three cakes per weekend (at $3 per cake with mix and eggs that can add up quickly). I had read once about people making snowballs from shaved soap and thought I might be able to use the same technique.

I bought cheap yellow bars of soap, then used my cheese grater to shred the bars into a bowl.

I carefully poured the shavings into my pan and packed them in, but they weren't packing very tightly. They still seemed very grainy and loose in the pan

. 

I turned it over and sure enough I was right. the shredded soap didn't hold together at all and I just had a pile of flakes. 

I decided to add some water to make the soap stickier, so I packed the flakes in again and poured some water into the pan. TOO MUCH. 

I ended up with a gooey sticky mess that I had to throw away. Turns out the water thing requires a much lighter touch. 

My next solution was to spray the pan with water and then periodically spray the soap as I was filling the pan before packing another layer. I thought that the water on the outside would help the soap be especially sticky on the shell of the cake where I needed it to be. As is turns out, the water on the outside just made the soap especially stick to the pan.

The final solution was Pam to make sure that the soap didn't stick to the pan. 

and then slowly adding water to the mix (with a spray bottle this time) until the soap was ready to stick to itself. 

As a side note, you can see here why people use this method for snow balls, they ball up perfectly and I'm sure they would explode on impact.

I packed the soap into the pan again

and then turned it over and hit it with one good whack on the pan to release it

This one cracked a little getting it out, but you get the idea. 

This cake ended up getting cut because it was hard to clean up after being smashed in the middle of the floor, and because someone in the company offered to make a cake every night for the run. It's a really cool trick though and I think that it might have lots of applications in future shows. 

Foam Fish

So first, some personal news, because I'm so excited I have to tell everyone that reads, I got engaged last Friday night. So keep an eye out, because in addition to props work and theatre crafts, you may be seeing some DIY wedding crafts on here in the future.

On to the fish!

For a production of New Electric Ballroom at A Red Orchid Theatre, I needed lots of large fish. On the small budget I knew I couldn't afford to cast them (I didn't have any leftover supplies from other projects and the right supplies can be expensive), so I started looking online for possible places to buy them. This also came up empty, as the fish I was finding were all too small and too expensive. To fill the two tubs I needed to fill I estimated I would need about 20 fish at that size.

I finally came around to the idea of carving them. I started with 2" pink foam and traced a fish shape onto the front.

On a side note, one of my favorite tricks when cutting intricate shapes with a jig saw is to do it on a foam base as opposed to trying to prop your piece between makeshift sawhorses. The foam doesn't resist the blade or slow it down, but still supports your project as you cut. In this case I was using a foam base under the foam I was cutting, but I have used this same method for cutting lauan and plywood too.

After I had the basic foam shapes, I carved them down with a long razor (also known as an olfa knife or a snap blade knife)

 

 And then I sanded them to a smooth finish.

 

I painted each fish with three coats of liquid latex,

 And then painted them all with a silver base coat.

 

Then they all got a dusting of green, concentrating on the fins.

I inserted little black beads for eyes, and painted a little red behind the gills and in the mouth and they were done. 

Because I was able to make them as big as I wanted, I only needed ten fish, and the total cost of paint, latex, and foam was only around $50, less than half what I would have paid to buy the fish online.