Black and Whites

I did a B&W Ribbon pour lest night and got some funky results. I am using low water because it keeps the colors more distinct from each other, or at least that is my observation, but I'm having a hard time getting a deep black, even though the batter looks oily black. The gel is different on low water soaps and I'm wondering if that makes a difference or if it has to do solely with water content and not the gel. Or maybe I'm really not putting enough black in it.

Anyhow, I got this out of the mold last night and I got such a kick out of it! Sorry, I didn't get the photos cleaned up yet and it's been nothing but cloudy cloudy cloudy with the flattest blue light; I need to get some outdoor photos but I was hoping for some sun. Not likely any time soon.

Decided to try some lily pads and a pond and it came out fairly well, although the surface was not smooth, because of doing a back-to-back soap. The other side was dreadful, so we shall just pretend it didn't happen. It is so difficult to get photos of what our eyes see, or so it seems to me, and I liked the variation I got in the water, so I took another turn at it. Since we had a snowstorm, I thought I'd take pictures of it coated with snow, for an On Frozen Pond look. It was more difficult than I thought because for some reason my camera wouldn't get a good focus on it often (too cold out?) and then the melting snow started turning the soap white.

This next week or two will be filled with black and white soaps for a challenge. It's such a classic and classy combo, but now the challenge is to design something to do the combo justice. It will be tough and there will be stiff competition, no doubt. I've done a couple but am waiting for a killer soap to come out of the cut. Not certain it will happen. Started getting a wet spot on the black soap so it has to dry out before any more photo shoots.

Back at it

Vacation and holidays can sure mess up a person's soap schedule. I had a fair lull there as I had a flurry of cleaning, which soaping can undo in about, oh, 2 minutes, and then I had to keep the house clean until the house sitter came while we went on vacation. In the last few weeks, I managed to unload about 30-40 pounds of soap so I have room at the inn and can finally mess up my house up a little bit.

I decided to try Nurture's Really Red as a base as I've only used it as accent before. The name is spot on because it is indeed really really red. It's like I can't wrap my mind around it; I keep looking at it trying to decide if it's too loud or if it's okay. It's lathering pretty white for a new soap, so cured, the lather should be white. It would make a great goth soap if you have a good hand with black such that it doesn't give gray lather. It would be a surprising thing to have such a richly colored and color saturated soap with white lather. Maybe I'll put that on my list of soaps-to-do.

I love the technique of using high and low water batters in the same soap for the color variations it gives. I haven't gotten the strong halo effects Auntie Clara has gotten in some of hers nor the dramatic color variation she got when making her blue ultramarine soap but I suspect micas won't give the same degree of that because they aren't pigments but are particulate. It's okay with me because I still like what I get. Next time I won't add a touch of Khaki Yellow though- looks brown and bruised.

I have seen some extraordinary work done with polymer clays and caning and have a small frog covered in the most remarkable tiles. They are stunning and some of the designs boggle my mind in terms of how they put the clays together to get such shading and structure. The idea of caning seems like something that would lend itself to soap potentially so I gave it a go today with visions of stunning spirals tempered by the likely reality that it would be ugly to fair. It was very time intensive and I put as much variety into color combos that I could get with my block of soap so I could see what came out best. I got plenty of air pockets and a few nice spots but the process of rolling the soaps out needs tuning badly. I have a few ideas but it takes enough time that I will let my ideas percolate and get refined in my mind for a while before I give it another go. I feel potential there though!

And last, my attempt at making a Fordite-like soap. Didn't go as planned as usual and had to spin it but to good effect, I think. I like it!

A sorry week for soap making

Wow. I got one good soap from a week of soap making. I hope people are in the mood to accept some less-than perfect soaps in a month or two; I have to get rid of everything eventually.

I was trying drop swirls and swirling. I am not at all good at drop swirls. In the end, I tried making a soap I saw that I loved and sometimes trying to reproduce something teaches you more than winging it without the model. Such was the case for me with this. I made 4-5 other soaps but none had the right drops and certainly none of them turned out well except for my copycat version. I am thankful to the person who made the soap I first saw. They used only paprika to get their base color, so I sued paprika-infused oil, paprika, a bit of red brick oxide and a discoloring FO. I got some water difference effects in the white and black, which I really like.

This is all I got for a whole week of soaping!

Living in the land of mediocrity 

Yes, that's where I've been, working my ass off to get the pattern I want and cutting to find that I'm am utterly utterly off base. Without knowing what I wanted, the soap looks fine for the most part, but the soapmaker's private hell is that knowledge of what was to be, but isn't. Honest to Pete, I'm ready to try voodoo to cure me.

I forgot to alternate the gold and the yellow and remembered on the last pour. Come on! Christmas soaps are okay although the second one is over-swirled and not as expected. Tried a swirl a la Petra and that turned out okay but of course is not nearly as good as hers. I did manage to get a thick sparkly gold mica swirl that went through the bar which was satisfying, I admit.

I am working on our current challenge which seems simple; drop swirl and then run a skewer through to swirl, no hangers allowed. I am a dunce at drop swirls. I will never assume that something that seems easy is at all easy. I simply cannot get anything to come out! My drops aren't going through the soap, of if they are, I'm swirling them into oblivion. If anyone knows why the drops always curve toward the center, please let me know. I don't think I can make any more trash so I may be done. I hate being so incompetent but I also hate drowning in bars of flops and I think my hatred of even more excess soap than I already have is outweighing my drive to nail a stupid drop and skewer, which we are affectionately calling a drop and swear- far more accurate. I'm showing you the best of them. The worst are, well, far worse.

I spent many hours trying to get my video together for the December Challenge I'm hosting for our forum. I did manage to get a soap I am very happy with but again, it was completely unexpected and did not go according to vision. Luckily for me, it came out better than my vision; how often does that happen?! The pink was made for the challenge (sooooo pink. The batter didn't look close to that pink.) and I love the 3D effect. I made the blue and white later and although I didn't get the depth effect, I like the bars. Made with two colors and all the variation is due to water difference. The challenge is based on Auntie Clara's blog posts about water discount in design, which is pretty amazing. I do love Auntie Clara.

Hangers abound

Our forum's challenge this month is secret feathers which started me on hanger swirls again. I had some good luck and some bad, as usual.

i like the color combo of the first one but am disappointed with the lack of fluidity in my swirls. It makes it look like I have a bad tremor.

In the second one, I had my hanger at the bottom (what looks like the top of the soap) but I pulled up the dividers first, stupidly, which knocked the hanger out of place so when I pulled it up, I completely missed all the colors. Looks kind of dumb as it is, but lesson learned.

The third soap is my favorite of the week and I've been trying to make something similar again but I haven't been able to get my trace right. In trying to make it agin, I discovered a love spell FO that actually accelerates some which was highly disappointing and so ended up with my unscented low batter batter being as thin as water and the scented part kind of gloppy. Should be interesting to see how the two consistencies play off each other. Or not. That one is currently under wraps trying to gel.

next month's challenge is drop swirls so I am trying to think of a good color combo or an interesting twist on that technique. I shall keep my eyes open, hoping for inspiration.

'Tis brief, but it's late and tomorrow is Monday, the start of another week to manage.

Lucky me!

I had a bad week of soaping. Everything had issues, from separation, to ricing in the mold to being just blech. I made a T&S mold out of legos because there is no 1 pound T&S mold that I have found, and then I had to put it to use. I don't know why but I decided to do a hanger swirl although I was not looking for a butterfly pattern. When I get to the bottom of a box of tallow, I always get a lot of crackling; there must some settling of different fats from top to bottom but I have nothing in which to melt 50 pounds of tallow to reintegrate everything, so I just expect the additional problem at the end of my box.

I think with this soap, the crackle works very well. This may be my favorite batch of soap ever because I like the flow and the old-fashioned look it has. Maybe it's not old-fashioned but just has a certain character that I like. Breaking a streak of lousy soaps may also endear me to it. I tried a similar thing in a different 1 pound mold but my colors were very thin and the background batter was much thicker. It's a very different soap from the first but I am happy with it too although the black soap wins out.