on saturday morning i headed off to the amba hotel at charing cross for a fun crafternoon of soap and bath bomb making, just in time for mother's day. well, my mum is in australia, obvs, and it's not even mother's day over there until may, aaand i don't really like baths either; i have this weird thing about being submerged, but... i really like crafting days, so when the lovely bunch over at joe blogs network got in touch asking if i'd like to come along, well... naturally, the answer was yes.
the hotel is literally attached to charing cross station, making it totally easy to find... unlike the canterbury suite, which was so super hard to find, mostly because the staff in the hotel had no idea what a 'blogger event' was, or knew what the heck bomb making class i was talking about. up and down the (lush) spiral i went, while trying to get in touch with laura who had already arrived, and eventually found a nice, besuited employee to take me where i needed to go. name tag applied, it was go time.
with an incredible spread to welcome us all to the event, we sat, chatting and munching, while naz from the midas touch talked us through the days agenda. now, we all know that bloggers in their basic nature are the most narcissistic over-sharers of all time, but the ice breaker round of "my name is..." at that event was the weirdest and most funny thing i've ever sat through. we were literally in stitches at the admissions of midget phobias and british comedy infatuations, and for a moment... we'd totally forgotten why we were there.
thankfully naz hadn't, and insisted on taking us through a brief history of soap for reference, before detailing our projects for the afternoon: a hard soap, a jelly soap, and one blasted bath bomb - or, the more pc re-branded name, the "phizzy (hemi)sphere". while the first two of the projects were pretty straight forward and definitely not completely screwed up by me, the last of the three - the fricken phizzy bloody sphere, was a whole nother thing.
"thing" is right; i'd created something that was akin to flubber and also the blob and also some other wild, chemically created creature. it was out of control, fizzing and burping and rising out of the bowl it was born in. people laughed, and i was embarrassed for my complete and utter failure at making something so bloody simple as a thing that is designed to dissolve in water. naz told me to do it again. it still sucked.
a couple of hours later, i was... pleasantly surprised at my creations. well, two thirds of my creations. the fizzy bastard still wasn't playing ball, but the jelly star and the solid soap both turned out perfectly! the whole experience was really fun, and both naz and her mum sheila were absolute legends.
their business midas touch crafts is a mobile-craft-party solution for hen parties and team bonding and the like, but instead of rolling around in piles of mobile-craft-party solution money, they literally give all their profits to charities. like, total do-gooding charities, who help find cures for horrible diseases that affect a lot of people. like the two of them, and a lot of us... top girls!
we had a great time with the two of them at the amba hotel, and owe a massive thank you to joe blogs for hosting and being general good eggs. how'd you spend your saturday, huh!
