My fire/lava side looks rather garish this morning, I am forced to admit. Perhaps a bit too much mica but I am hoping it will calm a touch with some heat.

I flipped it, so my ugly layer is inside; my apologies to whomever uses this soap because your last impression of it will be the use of my crappy color combo. Maybe they will like it for all I know because we are, of course, our own worst critics. I poured my water side and seriously, I must take a moment to curse soap and all it stands for. I waited and waited with my colors FOREVER until they just started to trace and then without notice or warning, my dark blue went to glop while I was pouring. It started coming out in chunks but there was nothing to be done but keep pouring. Hating to waste any batter, I pushed the last blob out in the corner and it looks pretty, well, blobby and uninteresting. It takes away from the overall effect but that will be cut onto a single bar, so I mustn't forget that I can essentially hide my shame.

My first layer was poured several days ago, my fire layer yesterday and water today, so it is currently in the oven at 170 for an hour to get the layers to adhere to the oldest one. Perhaps heat will get my fire to cool a bit.

Good lord, I haven't made any soap for months and months, not since my last post. I lost my mojo and had no desire whatever to make a single batch. I made a layer underneath this one that I hate because I chose the wrong colors so I reverted back to form and went for fire colors, some of my favorites. I was hoping for a lava look but was not thoughtful about my pour, at all, because I haven't made any soap for months and months and apparently no longer know how to think through the process of getting from A to B, but I always love fire, so this will do. I will try water as the next layer and see where I go.

I'm on bust number three or four for the cloud soap. I am in the middle of using this black and white bar I made and I can see the pattern in there for clouds if it were done in white and blue, but I am not capturing it quite right.

This one isn't too bad. I can see it looking pretty cloud-like but it's not what I want. I am using new FO's, one of which traced fast yesterday but not today, and looked slightly tan in one soap and dreadfully grossly neutral in another. I changed it up but was really looking forward to some new scents. That, however, will not be happening with this project. Sigh. Pardon the crappy lighting.

I am having terrible difficulty getting the real colors captured. This is pretty close but....

Next on the agenda is going back and trying a technique to get a cumulus cloud soap.

I couldn't resist one more variation on a theme with these colors. Not the best picture but once it's nicer outside, I'll try to get some decent ones. A gradient wall pour of 37 different colors. Each color was weighed out so it would be proportionately different but it doesn't feel as stepped as I thought it would. I must have mis-measured on one or two colors because two look a bit out of place, but I
can live with it. Next time, I won't top it off as I don't like the end of the tail going up. Live and learn.

Well, it took 42 cups of soap to get this, but it came out better than I anticipated. The batter was just at emulsion and when pouring it in, I couldn't tell at all if the colors had stayed distinct. The top was somewhat blended so for all I knew, I had an odd-ball tie-dye in there. I didn't use much water which makes the soap stay softer longer but once it hardens, it can break while cutting, so I cut early and got a little bit of road rash on the bars. It'll clean up well though. Now I have to find another color combo I like to try some other patterns. 

I loved the colors I got in this soap but I can't capture it outside. It looks about as intense as it did wet, but I just can't get it nor can I edit for it because the software is suddenly not working.

I sometimes forget how much fun it can be to do patterns in a slab.

Not hosting this month's challenge has allowed me to participate. We are making a soap after "Fire and Water" by Vicki Frost, which riffs off of the cell effect acrylic paints can have. However, she makes the cells separately and adds them. She did get a bit of the real cell effect but not to the degree acrylics give. In paintings, the layer of soap is very thin; I suspect if you could get the true effect with soap, it would take many many layers to get a bar of decent thickness.

At any rate, for my base, I did layers. I don't have as large a slab as she has so I can't tilt my pour the same way or get as much movement so I improvised a bit to get the colors to mix around more. I like the effect which can be soft and dreamy or just funky and space-like. I am not a fan of the added cells, to be honest, but the base pour is fun to do and leaves much to be explored.

The second one looks more like the second and darker picture but the lighter one seems to give a bit more detail. Looks like an egg yolk disaster. I forgot to take pictures of a couple ones I poured but you get the drift. The first one and the blue/green one were thinner so I got a softer effect and the others were a bit thicker so the colors are more distinctive.

Each layer is 8-10 ounces (oils) of soap poured into a 9 bar mold. This way, the effects go all the way through the layer and aren't just on the surface. More work, but more interest while using up a bar.

I just saw this picture of Saturn's moon, Titan. My blue/green soap looks kind of like it!

Just a quick post. I haven't made anything particularly original lately but I liked how this turned out!

Yes! I had been trying to get this pattern but was missing it. I had a pattern in mind but the soap was too thin to do it (the messy part on the end.) I had to improvise although I was hesitant about over-swirling but then it happened! Out of the guesswork came the original pattern that I had been aiming for, or very close to it. It makes me think of stingrays but is way more voluptuous. Unfortunately when I was swirling, I was looking at the big picture and not at how the bars would cut so I don't know if individual bars will capture it. Ah well, next time.

Oh my my my. I have been negligent in posting. It is not for lack of soaping but more for lack of pictures. I got a new camera and have been having a great deal of difficulty in getting the pictures to download to my computer, although it's supposed to be a great deal easier. Ha! Not for the tech un-savvy, like myself.

We are having an ebru challenge this month, so I thought I would post some of my pattern attempts. Paper marbling is a truly fascinating medium with some glorious patterns that are very difficult to dissect. Some are more straightforward, thankfully for someone trying to translate them to soap, but some are on a scale that makes trying them in a small slab impossible, and some I just cannot figure out.

Anyhow, here are some of my tries for this month.

Last month was a gradient challenge. I used yellow with increasing amounts of black for my colors but I didn't find this to be as colorful as I would have liked. I got the mix from Will Kempart but his yellow was Chromium Yellow, if I recall correctly, and adding black gave some very bright lime greens, which I did not get. I got olive but I'm sure that's due to the yellow I had at hand.

Then I tried to make some finer gradients that would look more like a blush from one color to the next. I am not that great at hanger swirls. The picture insists on being sideways.

Currently setting up for another patterns so we shall see what comes of it.