August 2017 Entry Thread Gem and Stone soaps

[galaxyMLP]

Please post a picture of your entry soaps here. Please remember to use a picture of the soap before carving (if it is carved) and after carving. Otherwise, one finished photo will do. Entry thread will close on the 26th and voting will begin within a few hours of close.

 

[Kittish]

Woo hoo! So, my soap is Blue Lace Agate. I know, shocking, right? No one ever would have seen that coming...

I made the loaf by splitting my soap up at a very thin trace, coloring and putting it into disposable piping bags. I cut off just enough of the tip of each bag so soap could drip out not too slowly with just barely any pressure on the bag. And proceeded to start making lots and lots of very thin layers. No swirls, just layers. Laying the bags on their sides with the open ends slightly raised kept them from leaking.

The soap is scented with my Blue Lace fragrance blend, and carved into assorted randomly shaped chunks weighing anywhere from about 5 ounces to under one ounce.

The loaf: I couldn't resist cutting the corner just a bit almost as soon as I got it out of the mold, the sides looked so incredibly promising.

Next photo is something of a happy accident, I didn't realize until I looked at the image that I had that awesome sky. Or that my soap colors matched it so perfectly.

Top view from one direction:

Top view from the other direction:

I had tons of fun doing this challenge!

 

[dibbles]

My entry for this challenge is Sunset Sodalite soap rocks. I decided to try making soap dough, which is pretty fun to play with. The first picture is of my soap rocks, and the second is an example of sunset sodalite.

 

[SunRiseArts]

here is mine! Is clear melt and pour colored with the crystal stone in different shades. Then cut into different pieces to make the formation.

I called them amethyst and amber. Scented with lavender and amber!

 

[artemis]

Way too many pictures. I am including all four stones, as they are "the same style."

I wasn't going to enter, but as I was cutting soap one day, I noticed how marbled it looked and started carving. That lead me to look at other soaps I had and carved some of those, as well. Looking up stones online took me back to my jewelry making interests, so I decided to make jewelry out of my "stones." If I had to choose just one for judging, it would be either the howlite or the Jasper. Hmmm...

The howlite is peppermint. The Jasper is the weirdly discoloring Twilight FO from Nurture (it looks a little more greenish IRL). The whiter Fluorite is lilac FO from MMS. The darker Fluorite is (I think) Winter Wonderland FO from Nurture.

ETA: the first picture shows examples of the actual stones. In case that wasn't clear.

 

[jewels621]

We live in the St. Croix river valley, so the river itself was my inspiration for this challenge. Both colors of the river rock soap are from the same batch....colored with BB Vintage Gray, but the soap I poured in the mold was layered with brick red mica and forced gelled, and the leftover soap that didn't fit in the mold was sprinkled with AC and yellow pigment and blobbed on parchment to dry without gelling. After 24 hours, I cut the molded soap as per usual and then hand-squished each rock into shape and polished under running water. Same with the lighter blobs.....at 24 hours, both were perfectly malleable for this project. These are scented with Little Black Dress from Fragrance Buddy. I know, weird choice, but it doesn't smell OOB like what I would consider "little black dress", so I wanted to test it to see what would come out. Still doesn't smell sophisticated to me, but does smell like plain old clean soap. I loved this challenge! My testers are already fighting over which rocks are theirs!

 

[penelopejane]

I was trying to match the river rocks we have used to cover an area under the house.
I used activated charcoal and a cinnamon line.
My DH moved my carefully selected mound of rocks that I modelled my soap on so I had to scrabble around to find a similar selection!

 

[MySoapyHeart]

My inspiration was a turqoise. I made one of my trusted recipes and fragrances, and used a mix of activated charcoal, brown, green, blue and sort of lagoonblue-green color.
Mixed the soap to thin trace, and added the colors to an uncolored batter, swirled everything together so it would be streaks and layers within the soap that would apear when I carved in it. This is a more green/blye type of turcoises, not that icy cold turqoise you see everywhere.

I am not sure how accurate this is portrayed, but the challenge was SUPAH fun, I would do it again in a hearbeat!
PS! Fragranced with Green Irish from NG. These will be included in a gift package fora gentleman when they are done curing.

First - one of the images I was inspired from:

 

[earlene]

My entry is Rhodochrosite Gemstone Jewelry soap. I used 4 shades of pink and white, using BB's Brick Red Oxide and Nurture Soap's Red Vibrance, mising the two reds with varying amounts of TD to get different shades of pink. I used the same recipe for all the soaps, but a different lye concentration with each. In the photo is an uncarved regular bar of soap that was the [40% Lye Concentration], which I am using for propping up the other soaps. The carved soaps were made with [33% Lye Concentration]. Planned fragrance was Mad Oil's Rose, but I forgot to put it into the soap! So these gemstone jewelry soaps are un-fragranced. I did later add it to a carrot juice soap that I colored using the same oxides in order to match colors to fragrance.

Before carving:

Using a Cutco paring knife, a dental tool and my fingernails, I carved an outer ridge for the necklace 'jewelry' and did a bit of smoothing of the surface and edges. I hand painted with two different gold micas to simulate the Bezel Cup that would hold the stone in the setting. In the two pictures below, I included my Rhotocrozite ring and a gold necklace chain to enhance the theme.

 

[BattleGnome]

I was aiming for black granite (like countertops) but ended up more of a grey. I found an appropriate pic to kind of represent the direction I was headed in.

My overall idea was to layer then run a chopstick through the batter but the bars I did that with crumbled. These were the best ones, conveniently the ones I left alone to see what the batter would do. The bottom layer is just coconut/olive/canola. The second layer. Added some glitter, salt, and mica. The last layer I added jojoba beads. I didn't separate anything, just added stuff to the pot after pouring the last layer.

 

[toxikon]

My turquoise soap entry! Not as nicely carved as the rest of the entries but I was running out of time. The colours ended up turning out quite nicely though! Scented with a clean citrus.

 

[cherrycoke216]

Here's my entry. Koroit Boulder Opal imitation soap.


It's a pine tar confetti soap. The pine tar eat up most of the teal/green and purple... and it's really brown every where. But I quite like the marbling effect. I'm not good at carving, so I'll just enter it as is. I think using it might reveal more of the teal and purple inside.

Let me see if I can find a natural sunlight to take other pictures.

 

[cherrycoke216]

I'm sorry that I can't edit more pictures to the original post. It will only show up the picture number, but no photo. Some mod help me please.



Apologize again for the inconvenience. :headbanging:

 

[BrewerGeorge]

Wow, Folks. I am seriously impressed!

 

[cherrycoke216]

Wow, Folks. I am seriously impressed!

Come join us this month!!! BG! (Voting has ended, so I guess reply here is fine?)

 

[SoapTrey]

You guys are creative geniuses. You could absolutely just throw some of these on the ground and I would never know it was soap. Congrats to the winners!