I gave myself one weekend to go crazy with the Un-Challenge before I get serious about holiday prep and then take off for Arizona for a week. It’s been wonderful to see the soaps others are posting. I am always inspired by the creativity!
My first un-challenge was to make color blocks for all of the blue micas I have. This was my “be more disciplined” challenge! The micas are all from Nurture. I added 1/16th teaspoon to 55 g of batter (just under 2 oz). That’s less than half the recommended amount for Navy in the upper left corner, which is probably why it looks grey. I used that mica at a higher concentration in a soap I made this past summer and it was fine. For Baby Blue in the lower left corner, I ran out of batter, so that one is more concentrated with the same amount of mica in 20 g of batter. I used that one in a soap I made recently and it went green due, I think, to an FO that Is a bit yellow. My base recipe for the test blocks was made with GV tallow, lard shortening which has a wee bit of soybean oil, and CO, OO, and castor oil. I left them unscented.
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With the blue test blocks done, I moved on to use an impression mat I bought during the summer, but never used. I selected Klein Blue (upper right corner) as a base color and added a small amount of TD to a portion of uncolored batter for the lace. I haven’t cut it yet, but I’m really pleased with how easily it came out of the mold and how easy it was to remove the mat. The scent is White Lily and Aloe from BB which is new to me and known to accelerate, but not discolor. I successfully avoided disaster by soaping at 90F and adding the fragrance at trace. I switched to my Bastile base recipe for this soap. Unfortunately, the blue looks a lot more grey than it does in the test block. I suspect the culprit in the color shift is the RBO (5%) I used to up the linoleic just a tad. Even with the addition of TD, the soap in the lace is verging on tan. I don’t like to use a lot of TD, so I guess I will be relegating the RBO to darker soaps for the future. (ETA: It wasn’t the RBO. I made another small batch w/o RBO and got grey soap again. I’m puzzled...).
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More to come! ETA: Here’s the rest of my Un-Challenge results.
First, the cuts of the lace soap:
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for this next one, I used BB’s Apricot Freesia FO and a new to me mica called Summer Crush from Nurture. The FO does not accelerate or discolor. I was hoping for a nice apricot color from the mica, but no luck. I used the same recipe as above, which has 5% RBO. It’s not quite the dreaded flesh color, but almost. Perhaps it will cure to a better color. If not, I will be sticking to a very white base in the future.
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Here’s my last soap for the Un-Challenge. It’s my first attempt at making a marbled soap. Same base recipe as above, but colored with rose clay from BB at 1 tsp ppo. Note to self: the base recipe did not affect the color of the clay... the FO is a custom blend of BB’s White Ginger and Amber (80%) and Wild Rose (20%) that I call “Desert Rose.” I used what I thought was a ton of mica, but it hardly shows up in the soap. I poured a bunch of layers that I did not allow to set and dusted each with a continuous layer of mica. The intent was to have each successive layer break through the mica and batter layer below to produce highly uneven layers accented by mica. I think that part was somewhat successful. Out of the mold, I cut blocks of soap from the loaf and then cut horizontally through the blocks. A lightbulb came on as I was doing that. I think I should angle the layers a bit the next time so that more of them are cut when I make the horizontal cuts through the blocks. Or, I should find a YouTube video that shows the right way to make a marbled soap
. In any case, the texture of the soap is perfect and I think it will clean up nicely.
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Thank you
@dibbles for this fun Un-Challenge and for your always inspiring soaps!
