Style Weekly
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Homefront: A Bubbly Luxury
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Best bridesmaid's gift ever.
Once a year, Claudia McClung combs out her herd of cashmere goats and collects grocery sacks full of what she pulls out. The heavy guard hairs are professionally removed, and the cashmere strands — each one only 15 microns wide — are returned to her.
She processes the cashmere by hand, agitating it in soapy water until the fibers meld together into a cashmere felt, which she wraps around bars of goat's milk soap.
It's a therapeutic process, she says — like making bread: "The kneading of the bread makes you feel good and that's kind of how felting is."
The cashmere-covered soap is like a luxurious loofah, she says, "kind of like a mild scrubby thing you would use in the bathtub." The best part: Your sudsing continues the felting process so the extra fabric shrinks along with the soap.
McClung sews individual cloth bags for the soaps and sells them for $16 at the Very Richmond shop in the Omni Hotel. HS
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