Week 10 of the weekly "Soap Challenge".

This week's soap challenge was to make a "Landscape Soap". The first challenge for me in even doing this soap was to think of a landscape that I thought I would be capable of doing. I have been thinking about it for a couple of weeks as I knew I would need to do my embeds for this soap ahead of time, so I decided  to do a sunrise scene. I wanted the soap to look like a slice of the earth (like you see in gardening books showing your planting layers). The week before I made extra soap base so I could create the sun ahead of time.
For my colors I used a brown mica for the ground, green oxide for the grass, for the sky I used ultra marine blue and added a blue mica, for the clouds I added a white mica to the natural soap base. I scented the soap using a "Eucalyptus & Spearmint" fragrance oil. I was not sure how this fragrance would behave so I added some to each layer as I did them, instead of to the whole batch. When I sliced the soap on my cutter it was a bit hard to get through the sun part in the soap since it was made the week before and was quite a bit harder, but it did cut it without breaking the cutting wire.

This was a fun challenge and I would like to try this again and hopefully my imagination can come up with something with a lot more detail.

I will share some of the pictures of the process and the finished soap. I hope you will all go to Great Cakes Soapworks  and take a look at all the other great soaps made for this challenge.

Next week's challenge: Making soaps using natural ingredients.

Here is the tube I used to make the sun. I tried something new to plug the bottome of the pipe, I poured some heated melt & pour soap base in the small plastic container and while it was still melted I put the pipe in and let the soap base cool before I added my cp soap base. It worked really well and I did not have to worry about the bottom leaking, plus when I pushed my soap out of the tube I was pushing against the melt & our base and not the actual soap embed. 

Here is the sun out of the pipe mold. Now I will cut off the
melt & pour soap plug and it will be ready to embed into my soap.

The brown first layer poured.
Mixing the green next layer. 

Green layer added. I am making peaks on this layer hoping that it will look like grass standing upright. It did not look that tall after pouring on the sky color, I think I should have let it set up longer.

The blue is poured, added the sun and more clouds.

I added the remainder white soap base and swirled
the top to make it look like fluffy clouds. 

Here is the soap out of the mold. I lined my mold using
plastic and I don't like the wrinkles it created on the sides.
Note to self: take the time to line it with the normal
butcher paper. A silicone mold insert would be nice  :)

Soap bars cut.

I took the end cuts from the soap loaf and
made soap balls again to use as embeds.
I think they look like little world globes, what do you think?

Introducing "Rise n' Shine"

Todays Forecast - Sunny, Partially Cloudy with a  'Chance of Showers'.