#GetyourSpire in beautifully carved soap!

These little beauties were hand-carved by year 7 pupils at Collegio Villoresi. We had a lot of good clean fun making gothic spires, gargoyles and other bas-relief shapes from blocks of hand-washing soap. The main carving tool was the classic toothpick, but we did use a few other tools to sculpt our designs.

Our works of art were inspired by gothic architecture and in particular the Duomo di Milano, a wonderful complex of monuments, including the terraces on the top of the cathedral where you can view the spires and gargoyles close-up. Milan’s cathedral is the third largest in the world!

Other pupils used a more modern famous form – Picasso’s dove. Picasso’s first Dove of Peace was chosen as the emblem for the First International Peace Conference in Paris in 1949. It was a traditional, realistic picture of a pigeon which had been given to him by his great friend and rival, the French artist Henri Matisse.

Picasso later developed the image into a simple, graphic line drawing that is one of the world’s most recognisable symbols of peace. He also named his fourth child ‘Paloma’, the Spanish word for ‘dove’.

Soap is lovely and soft to work with. Give it a try!