Elephant Soap

Elephant Soap - Updated with Pics P. 6

I have a friend who will be "walking for elephants" in February to raise awareness and money for a sanctuary in Africa. She will be holding a fundraising event before she goes over there, and I want to contribute a nice batch of soap that can be raffled or sold with proceeds to the cause. I am a biologist so it is obvious to me that this soap should somehow mimic these beautiful beasts, even if abstractly. Things coming to mind are: Gray, Wrinkly Skin (marble or texture?), Ears, Trunks, Tusks, Tracks (round bars). But nothing is really solidifying!

I don't have much experience with swirling or color techniques so it probably needs to fairly simple. I do have activated charcoal and TD so can make shades of gray. In fact I did already make a solid gray soap, but it's quite underwhelming. Maybe a two-toned gray/ivory rustic hot process bar with black pencil line?

What comes to your mind? Give me your ideas and pictures please! The elephants need our help!

Oh! What a fabulous idea! Elephant soap!

I have a couple of ideas! Dead Sea Mud soap (when gelled) gives what I think is a really nice steely greyish colour. You could add some of that for colouring and spike it with a bit of TD or charcoal if you want to tweak the colour. I recently made a batch of DSM soap and it had a tendency to ash and made the top look really nice and silvery, so if, instead of doing a whirly swirl on top, if you did straight squiggles with a skewer, you could get it to look like elephant skin. I'll put some pics in at the bottom so you can see what I mean. (I can't figure out how to put attached pictures into the middle of a post, so they are attached and will show up last,)

You could cut long triangle slithers from a log of white soap to look like tusks and embed them from above. Kind of like this but just with two tusks and put them in from above, sticking point down into the soap. I would probably look best if it was made in a tall mold;



http://sironasprings.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/262239_178102155585692_8208587_n.jpg

Or you could make some round white tubular embeds in a paper towel tube, cut them in half lengthwise and lay three of them running lengthwise through at the bottom of the mold, in the full width of the mold, before pouring your grey batter over, so the whole soap would look like a giant elephant's foot.

Oh! You could also make six smaller halved tubes and put them in two groups of three at either corner of the soap at the bottom to represent the 2 feet (The three halved tubes side by side would be the three toenails) and then stick two tusks in from above and do a wrinkly skin on top!

I hope I could give you some ideas.

I was just thinking.. if you made TWO soaps, one with feet and one with tusks as a set or a mini-series, maybe people would be tempted to buy TWO soaps so as not to split up a matching pair sort of thing, and you could maybe raise even more money!

Maybe check out the local craft stores and see if you can find some elephant stamps?

What kind of mold do you have? If you have a log mold (horizontal, not vertical) maybe try to do a scene. For example, do the bottom layer in green, then do grey blob in the middle. Surround the grey blob with white soap, then top it off with blue or yellow for the sky. It's Elephant on the Savannah soap. You can actually do really cool things with a log mold if you sort of reorient your mind's eye.

You could also get something like this: http://www.bulkapothecary.com/soap-...veled-12-rectangle-tray-soap-mold-12-99-each/
and then draw an elephant in each square before pouring in the rest of the soap.

Me again. (Sorry about that.)

Another thought I had was, that if you did incorporate Dead Sea Mud into the soap, you could run with that and use it as a sales pitch of sorts. Mud is after all elephant-related in a way. You could have picture of an elephant mud-bathing and say something like that "Elephants have known for Millennia about the skin-loving properties of mud and now you too can experience it's soothing and beneficial properties." ... Or something... Blah blah blah.

I'll shut up now.

Oh! Idea! Do you have freezer paper? cut a square/rectangle that will fit the top of your soap, crumple it up for crinkly texture, and press onto the top (the plastic side against the soap!) and allow it to harden, then when it's hard enough you can peel it off and have your wrinkly top. I mean if bubble wrap can be used to make a honey comb texture, why wouldn't this work?:wink:

Tiene, those are fabulous ideas and fabulous pics! I knew I was in the right place asking the right question. I love it all -- the mud, toenails, the direct skin connection -- and all the rest! Please don't shut up, this is exactly what I wanted! I know through all of these ideas I will come up with something that allows me to work within my capabilities while stretching me where I never thought I could go! Thanks so much, and please do keep it coming!

Lizflowers42, great minds think alike. I actually did do something like that with shavings and the soap ball when I cut the plain gray soap. I basically enveloped it in an oversized piece of saran wrap and flattened it all like a pancake so that there was lots of crinkly contact. The soap was pretty soft so that actually worked okay. But it didn't look even a fraction as good as the skin pic Tiene left. I also didn't do it at the scale I would need to. I will rethink this concept in combination with some of the other great ideas here!

Dixiedragon, I can envision the savannah scene and totally love the idea! It would probably be like child"s art coming from me... oh wait... have you heard of the zoo elephants that paint with a paintbrush in their trunks? It might look kind of like those, and make people more forgiving of my rudimentary talents!

Fantastic! I'm thrilled I could help inspire you! I can hear your creative juices bubbling from here! LOL That's what it's aaall about.

Okay, what else can I think of? The tusks and toenails would probably look better if they were ivory coloured (duh, of course), instead of white and if you cut those triangle slithers when the log was still soft, you could curve them ever so slightly to give them more of that authentic curved tusky look. If they are too straight, they might come out looking more like dracula fangs. That wouldn't do. LOL

That's all I can think of! ... For now.

Now go forth and soap where thou hath never soaped before!! *All the while raising my stick blender victoriously into the air*

I truly would get an elephant stamp made....

Lindy said:

I truly would get an elephant stamp made....

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Lindy, I have never looked in to this. Any place you'd recommend that makes them? Dixiedragon was first thinking stamps, too. I suspect it could be perfect in its simplicity, especially given that I am a little artistically challenged! I could probably find a tasteful design on the internet, hopefully w/o getting in too much trouble for copying somebody's masterpiece.

Tienne said:

The tusks and toenails would probably look better if they were ivory coloured (duh, of course), instead of white and if you cut those triangle slithers when the log was still soft, you could curve them ever so slightly to give them more of that authentic curved tusky look. If they are too straight, they might come out looking more like dracula fangs. That wouldn't do. LOL

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I would like to try imbeds; the ones in your photo look so cool. Is that your soap? I have a feeling I would probably carve fangs, but hey, if I did, just think what a terrific bar I'd have a year from now on next Halloween!

If you rounded off the points on the triangles before embedding and made sure the base of the triangles/tusks were somewhat broader than the embeds in the photo, that would probably help avoid the fang look.

The Dead Sea Mud soap pic is one of mine, but the beautiful pink and grey soap with the embeds is one I saw on http://sironasprings.wordpress.com/ There are some absolutely stunning soaps on that blog and I get a lot of inspiration from there.

Check out this one. This is next on my to-do list, I think it looks fantastic;

http://sironasprings.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/embedding-soap-a-great-way-to-reboot-a-batch-of-soap/

*Sighing* ... So many soaps, so little time.

Tienne said:

*Sighing* ... So many soaps, so little time.

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Nonsense, you have a full life of soaping ahead of you

Tienne said:

If you rounded off the points on the triangles before embedding and made sure the base of the triangles/tusks were somewhat broader than the embeds in the photo, that would probably help avoid the fang look.

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That makes sense. I have a small walrus tusk that I can use as a model. Nothing like nature (and a few good suds buds) to show the way.

Tienne said:

Check out this one. This is next on my to-do list, I think it looks fantastic;

http://sironasprings.wordpress.com/2013/09/15/embedding-soap-a-great-way-to-reboot-a-batch-of-soap/

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Those look fantastic and super easy! I definitely have to try that one!

Tienne said:

*Sighing* ... So many soaps, so little time.

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lizflowers42 said:

Nonsense, you have a full life of soaping ahead of you

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Good point lizflowers. I can't wait until retirement! But I think I'll need a bigger soap closet :mrgreen:

I strongly recommend Dave Neat @ LaserCutz http://lasercutz.co.uk/, his work is exceptional, as is his pricing, speed of processing your order and customer service....

Lindy said:

I strongly recommend Dave Neat @ LaserCutz http://lasercutz.co.uk/, his work is exceptional, as is his pricing, speed of processing your order and customer service....

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Awesome, thank you Lindy, I'll check it out.