Busy

I've been busy getting the May Challenge set up and also making soap for someone wedding shower so haven't had time for monkeying around like I prefer. I did get a couple oddities made however, so i may as well show them

First one was made to try to get a certain blue fringe movement. It was much more difficult than I imagined, to try to get the splay I wanted. Soap moves all in the same direction once it's in a slab mold and it's difficult to get some of it move one direction and the part right next to it to move in the other using a method that gives it that organic, scattered in the wind feel.

I love the effect I got from this one, where soap leaked around an obstacle, giving this gentle muted play of colors.

Because I lost so much of my blues to the leak, the soap this ^ was meant to be in had a humungous proportion of greens and yellows, which were meant to be more concentrated in the middle. I was lost on this one and ended up making something that reminds me of a trilobite. Not my finest hour.

Onward and upward. Better soaping days ahead, I hope.

Some Challenge soaps

I am having no luck with computers today so will quickly post a few of the soaps I made for this month's challenge from our forum. Because the photo application is so slow, I am posting kind of blind so I hope I pick the right ones!

This month's challenge to so learn Petra Seifenkunst's swirl. Excellent tutorial presented by Liz from Amber Waves of Soap and since I've completely messed this up, I was pleased to get a few that look pretty close. My first one has too thick a layer of colors.  My second one, the brown one, was done wrong because I did the horizontal pull too high so had to redo it at the proper depth and two horizontal pulls is against the rule. I like the effect even so. I was happy with my third one so hopefully the photo will be of the right one. I like the effect of the end bar, with the blurring around the edges and some of the detail coming through.

I made one soap that is acceptable for my challenge in May. It may look like it's done with a faux funnel technique (or my favorite description "drowning the eyeballs") but it's not. It was a done with a more continuous pour. I got a video made so that will come in May.

I made a soap with a specific pattern in a slab and then used the exact same pattern to swirl in a loaf to see if I would get the same look. I can see elements of the swirl in the loaf, but the weight of the soap doesn't seem to let it move the same way that it does in a slab. I used the same swirl tool but I wonder if I used a larger diameter tool in the loaf, if I would get enough of an increase in movement that the pattern would show itself more. Will have to try again!

I like the colors in this soap. I lost my shred of discipline in doing the swirl pattern I meant to test and I ended with two circles in the middle which broke up the pattern more than I expected, and I still don't know what the pattern I wanted to test looks like. What is wrong with me? I now have two batches in the wings for this week. I hope I don't get distracted.