Entry thread for the SMF March 2023 Challenge - Trip or Travel inspired

[szaza]

This is the entry thread for the March 2023 SMF Challenge – Trip or Travel inspired. As a reminder, this entry thread is for challenge photos only. Please post any comments to the general challenge thread, here.

You are welcome to post more than one photo, but the photo for the voting survey should be at the top of your entry post. As a reminder, you must present at least one bar of the soap you made for this challenge and tell us a little bit about your trip, why was it important to you/what made you choose this trip and in which ways it inspired your soap. Please refer to the specific challenge rules, here, to refresh on the other rules for this challenge.

The entry thread will remain open until March 27th at 11:59 pm GMT. After the entry thread closes, the winning entry will be chosen using Survey Monkey. A message with the voting survey link and password will be sent to those who signed up for the challenge and the results will be announced in this thread soon thereafter. There is no prize attached to this challenge.

Good luck to all!

P.S. Please remember that each participant will need to look up the correct time for the location where they live. Here is a link to one mechanism for determining the correct time in your time zone versus GMT: GMT to CST Converter - Savvy Time

 

[Blufuz]

I’ll go ahead and start

~*~ Savon Provençal ~*~

This was a soap I wanted to make even before the challenge, when I went to visit family in southern France over Christmas. I had a plan to learn how to make Marseille soap, using ingredients I collected on my trip. Nothing went according to plan It’s a long story, but it’s what made the trip memorable, and the soap meaningful.

First, the base oil. I was hoping to learn from the soap museum of Marseille how to make Marseille soap, only to discover that there’s no such thing! There’s no legal protection for the term, and so the vast majority of “Marseille soap” can be made in any way with any ingredient, although usually it’s vegetable oils. There’s a few producers who stick to a traditional method, but this is an industrial hot-process method that uses some olive product that is not commercially available and makes the soaps dark green. The closest handmade method is just a normal Castile soap, and so I went with ZNSC; also very fitting because Marseille is by the sea.

Next, color. In Provence there’s a town called Roussillon, next to beautiful open-air ochre mines:

I was hoping to make an ombré that matched this place, but I couldn’t use actual ochre because apparently it’s very staining and not great for soap. So instead, I took a little baggie of red dirt from outside the park (not allowed to take it from inside), I washed OUT the ochre, and ended up with a nice red sand. This made little sprinkles in the soap, which I then colored with saffron, titanium dioxide and madder root in a literal pale imitation of Roussillon.

Last, fragrance. The choice was obvious: lavender. It was Christmas, so the markets were in full-swing, they were selling it by the liter, amazing. I got a 250 ml super-bio glass bottle of pure lavender essential oil for a great price. I wrapped it up nicely in a scarf and gently placed it in the center of my backpack, then I was ready to head home. The entire trip it was super warm, but somehow, at the Marseille Saint-Charles train station that day, it was suddenly freezing. I wasn’t thinking, I just opened my bag to grab the scarf and suddenly, CRASH. Explosion of glass, a pool of clear liquid spreads across the train station floor. The smell of lavender permeates the main hall. Resigned, I start cleaning up the glass, but as I walk back to the puddle, I find commuters who didn’t see the accident just calmly walk right through it, assuming it was just water. Now, lavender is being tracked everywhere, on the platforms and eventually on the trains. I imagine that before the day was over, it had even reached Paris; for sure the scent followed me all the way to Zürich and I hadn’t even stepped in it. I bet train stations have never smelled so nice, but in the end, for this soap I had to use what was left over from before the trip.

So there you have it, a Provençal soap scented with lavender but not from Provence, sprinkled but not colored with Roussillon red sand, and made with olive oil but not strictly “Marseille”. Still, I learned a lot along the way, and made a dirty train station, maybe even more than one, smell wonderful

Here’s a closeup:

 

[Vicki C]

Here’s my entry!
This past February I went to the west coast to visit my daughter and family, which includes my 7yo grandson. They live north of Seattle, and we took a day trip to Whidbey Island, to a state park with beautiful trails and a rocky beach where we spent a lot of time throwing rocks and balancing on drift logs. This was the only sunny day of my visit, and it was a really special day. I spent a lot of time with my grandson when he was an infant and since they moved two years ago I have missed them.
The rocks on the beach were so beautiful, I couldn’t resist taking three to make soap molds. I’ve had some two part silicone waiting for me to have time to use it and so I made three molds with three perfect sized rocks. I have been playing with confetti and ciaglia soaps and I just love the results. Here are the soaps.

Here are the soaps with their rock twins.

Here are the molds I made. Silicone is super fun to play with. I’m hooked. I was able to keep a lot of the impression of the rock so there is just the small area you see without the rock impression.

Here is a rock rainbow we made on the beach.

Can you find the soap in the photo below? (These are photoshopped onto a photo of rocks from the beach.)

And here are my loved ones. The Pacific Northwest is so beautiful.

Thanks for looking!

 

[BrownRoseEssentials]

Here’s my entry!
This past February I went to the west coast to visit my daughter and family, which includes my 7yo grandson. They live north of Seattle, and we took a day trip to Whidbey Island, to a state park with beautiful trails and a rocky beach where we spent a lot of time throwing rocks and balancing on drift logs. This was the only sunny day of my visit, and it was a really special day. I spent a lot of time with my grandson when he was an infant and since they moved two years ago I have missed them.
The rocks on the beach were so beautiful, I couldn’t resist taking three to make soap molds. I’ve had some two part silicone waiting for me to have time to use it and so I made three molds with three perfect sized rocks. I have been playing with confetti and ciaglia soaps and I just love the results. Here are the soaps.

View attachment 71442
View attachment 71443

Here are the soaps with their rock twins.

View attachment 71444

Here are the molds I made. Silicone is super fun to play with. I’m hooked. I was able to keep a lot of the impression of the rock so there is just the small area you see without the rock impression.

View attachment 71445

Here is a rock rainbow we made on the beach.

View attachment 71448

Can you find the soap in the photo below? (These are photoshopped onto a photo of rocks from the beach.)

View attachment 71449

And here are my loved ones. The Pacific Northwest is so beautiful.

View attachment 71447
View attachment 71446
Thanks for looking!

Wow! These are so cool! You did a really good job!

 

[szaza]

Wow! These are so cool! You did a really good job!

As a reminder, this entry thread is for challenge photos only. Please post any comments to the general challenge thread, here.

 

[Cindy D.]

We spend a fun week exploring around Greenville, Maine. We had fun canoeing on a lake in the middle of a logging forest with no cabins or houses on it, exploring dirt roads, dams, lakes and rivers. At night in the campground I was reacting to sulfur dioxide fumes. Most nights were miserable and spent with me coughing and using my inhaler. When we were ready to head south we planned our route to avoid all the paper mills on the way, so I could breath. We came to a big lake with sail boats and stopped to look. This was the scene at one of the inlets to Echo lake, Mount Vernon. I've always loved this picture of the old tannery smoke stack and had been thinking of trying to do it in soap... just to see if I could.


Using mirrored drawings of the picture on both ends as guides helped with placement of the tower and it's reflection in the water below.
The image below is after scraping and placing the bridge and then scraping again before adding trees. I hadn't intended to use scrapers and had to print another copy of the picture to make them from. I quickly realized there was no way I could make things even from one end to the other without them.
This image below is the trees. One shade of green was spooned into another ITP, mixed slightly and then spooned into the mold.
The soap dough smoke stack was also placed, the pictures on the end helped a
lot.

These are the scrapers I made out of old cutting boards.


I had fun making this and made at least one mess when I tried to use an opened up paper clip in my dremel as a mini stick blender.... it did work if the dremel wasn't turned up to high.
Thanks for looking!

 

[The_Emerald_Chicken]

For my entry, I took advantage of @szaza's allowance that the inspiration doesn’t have to be far from home. Massanutten Mountain is a landmark in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley, where I live. I have really enjoyed hiking the mountain with friends and taking in the lovely view from the top at sunset. The picture below was taken last September on one such hike.

Here's a fuzzy picture I found online that I used as a basis for my sketch.

First I sketched the design I wanted in my soap; then I cut cardboard scrapers for each layer.

I made the soap in two batches since there were so many layers, and I made some extra batter so I didn't have to worry about running out.

Here's a picture showing the other side of the mountain, the way that I originally sketched it out.

 

[basti]

Ehe! It's time

Meet Dancheong!

My location of choice is South Korea

I spent a year in SK. It is a truly gorgeous place with wonderful scenery (the mountains! the sea! cherry blossom season! ) and impressive architecture (both historical and modern). Not to mention the people in my city -- I met so many kind and warm hearted folks. I will never ever forget getting scolded (lovingly) by the lady who owned the convenience store in my apartment building. I was buying a snack and a drink before heading out for the day and I was wearing my winter coat despite it being early spring and starting to get warm outside. She was not pleased. I switched to a lighter jacket the next day. Sorry auntie.

While thinking about my options for this prompt, I considered doing a scenery soap of some kind but as I was flipping through my photos, my brain kept coming back to the photos I had of the traditional architecture, namely the temples I'd enjoyed quiet moments in. Temples and palaces in Korea have a distinct color scheme based on Wuxing, the five Chinese elements. This color scheme is called Dancheong 단청. The main two colors are cinnabar red (fire) and a soft blue-green (wood). The other main colors are black (water), white (metal), and yellow (earth).

The design I came up with was a textured layered soap inspired by the wavy lines and the color pattern in the following photos

And a little zoom in to those rafters that inspired me so much

Red -> Blue -> Yellow -> Blue-green -> Pink with a little bit of black on top instead of a brownish-red. I used the colors from the swatch image above to try and get as close as possible with the colorants I had.

Those are my colors and design inspo, but how about the rest?

For ingredients, I used green tea from Jeju Island as my water replacement. I love green tea and I've found that Jejudo nokcha is my all time favorite. Especially the matcha
For fragrance, I opted for Cucumber Melon from Nurture Soap. The scent is meant to mimic the scent of Chamoe, a Korean melon that is a crisp melon with cucumber notes. Summer was so exciting getting to see the lovely folks selling produce on the sidewalk markets suddenly have an abundance of bright, happy yellow melons.

I hope you enjoy I'll leave you with a photo of Haedong Yonggungsa, a Buddhist temple on the southern coast of Korea.

 

[dibbles]

I wanted to tell this story for this challenge because it includes travel and our challenge host for this month. In September of 2019 my hubby and I went on a cruise with six long-time and very dear friends. One of our ports was Bruges, Belgium. As Belgium is where szaza lives, I sent her a message asking advice on what to do with only one day spent in port. To my surprise, she offered to meet us there! When I told her that she surely had better things to do with her weekend than escort eight 60-something American tourists around Bruges, she assured me that she would like to do it.

We made a plan to meet at the belfry tower. Szaza spent the day with us and we had a wonderful time. Bruges is a very charming city, and szaza is a very charming person. I’m so glad we were able to meet and the friends we traveled with still ask about her.

My memories of the day are the weather was beautiful. Szaza guided us to her favorite places, all of which we enjoyed seeing. She also suggested trying street waffles, took us to her favorite chocolatier, and to an amazing pub which displays hundreds of bottles of Belgian beer along with it’s own unique glass.

At the time, szaza was trying to create a soap with the qualities of lard, but without using animal products. As she wanted to test her soap against a soap made with lard, I offered to make some with her recipe and bring it with me. She also treated me to a few of her soaps made with beeswax. I just used up the last little piece a few months ago.

My entry is a beer soap, but as hubby and I are more partial to wine than beer I had to use what was available at home. Sadly, the beer is not Belgian although it is an ale. The colors in the soap are blue to represent the sea that we traveled on to reach Belgium and the beautiful sky, green for the green spaces and trees, brown for the cobblestones and a not quite right ivory for the color of the belfry where we met for the first time. I used bubble wrap to try to envoke a texture to represent the waffles. The fragrance is BB Yuzu. I chose yuzu because at the chocolate shop, after we had already picked out and paid for the things we wanted I noticed a little yuzu filled dark chocolate. I had never tried yuzu, but decided not to buy one. szaza kindly bought one for me and it was delicious!

szaza, I treasure our friendship. Thank you for a wonderful memory.
ETA: I will be seeing my friends that traveled with me in April, and they will each receive a bar of this soap!

Bruges

The beer wall (not my photo)

 

[CLMP]

So for one of my favorite vacation spots Cuba was on my list of favorites. I went there when I was young like more than 20 years ago with friends we had a great time on the beach. We went there for a wedding and had very good time. We also got a little foolish and went skinny dipping in the middle of the night and the Hotel guy comes running out to us get out of the water. He said the tide was coming in and that we were going to get stung by jelly fish so we got out the next morning there was jelly fish all over the beach lol. We got lucky. It was a very interesting trip. So what I really wanted to make was a Cuban Flag with the Cuban colors so I looked on line to see how to do this and was inspired by . I also used a new FO I bought called Coconut Cabana it was extremely hard FO to use It spead up trace so fast I had to squish my layers together with a spoon so my layers aren't straight but I did my best to work with it. The FO really does smell like Cuba though. The Colors I used was Magic Blue and Triel by Fire for red, also TD for my white. The blue is also a little off compared to the color I wanted to use. I would have preferred more of a royal blue but it works the way it is. I really thought my soap wasn't going to turn out but I'm happy with it here it is! The picture at the bottom was the photo I was inspired by.

 

[Nanna]

Mine is my favourite place in the world and since moving to Alberta I don’t get there near enough.
It’s where my mom was born and where I spent the first 2 years of my life, real bush baby. My great grandma and grandpa were there during the gold rush. They packed equipment for the stampeders and settled there after the rush and made a family. It’s still my real home
Now for the soap. I used some ground balsam fir needles from there when they cut trees for fire smart. Couldn’t let them go to waste. I had soap dough saved and added cocoa powder for the church, I looked like icing. After the church was set in I realized it was too big. I wanted more of the lake and mountains but I managed to fit a cpl trees and mountains in. The indigo didn’t get blue enough but there are cloudy days too. The cat had to do a photo bombView attachment 71573View attachment 71574View attachment 71577

 

[CreativeWeirdo]

Entry Photo:

Inspiration Photo:

Every year, during the summer, my parents have been renting the same cottage for two weeks ever since my sibling and I were little. It's part of a campground that my grandparents originally found and had parked their RV. When we were little, my parents would spend those two weeks with us at my grandparents' RV. They put up a tent on the lot, beside the RV, and I would sleep on the converted table inside the RV. As we grew older, my sibling and I would spend weeks on end in the summer with just my grandparents at that RV. One year, I came home with a kitten we found that had been abandoned. Eventually, us kids grew out of the little RV, and my parents started renting the cottage. We invited my Great-aunt and Great-uncle (my Grandmother's sister and BIL) to the cottage with us. Such a magical time, with everyone. We have "Campground Friends" that we still see and keep in touch with the rest of the year. It was always such a pain getting everyone ready and packed; my dad playing real-life Tetris, trying to fit everything into the car; and worst of all, the 6 hour drive back in the days before any kind of personal electronic device. But it was all worth it for that little slice of paradise. Swimming in the lake, fishing, tubing, campfires, pine trees, and naps on the porch swing. My parents still rent that cottage every year. I haven't been in a while; don't have many vacation days. My grandparents are long-gone, and hadn't been there for many, many year before that. This photo was taken at sunrise on the front steps, a little over fifteen years ago. (I framed it myself!) It hangs in my living room, and I look at it everyday, and am transported they. Pure peace; pure heaven!

Design:
I was originally going to attempt to [within reason] recreate the photo; with a carved sailboat embed and a sun cane embed. Alas, time got the better of me. So, I at least tried to do the rest of what I was planning. I made two half-batches (500g oils each). The bottom (lake) section is with indigo powder. I tried to layers with a cocoa sprinkle in between, but I was too eager and ended up smushing most of it. I mean, they do look like the waves, so I'm not mad about it. With the last of that indigo batch, I added black mica for the mountain-scape. I tried my best to be patient and wait for it to set a bit, then, with a SS spoon, I moved it to the sides to form the mountains. With the second half-batch, I used layers for the sunrise. Dark orange: 1 part yellow mica to 1 part red mica; Orange: 1 part yellow to 1/2 part red; Yellow: 1 part yellow to 1 part white. And I sprinkled some Gold sparkle airbrush mica on the top; just like the golden sun.

Scent:
Pine Needle EO; inspired by the pine trees everywhere.

Additives:
I used Marshmallow root powder, infused in OO (my recipe is 40% OO) and cocoa powder lines; inspired by the s'mores we would make at the campfires.

I will never leave a challenge this late again! The loaf was still very soft; even with putting it in the freezer for 20 minutes. I tried washing off the drag marks from my knife; and my place has terrible lighting for photos (I usually photograph by a window, with lots of natural light). So welcome to my bathroom wall! Thank you so much to @szaza for the heads-up!

 

[szaza]

The entry thread is now closed. The voting survey will be sent out shortly.

 

[szaza]

The votes are in.. These are the winners:
1st place: @basti
2nd place: a tie between @Cindy D. and @Vicki C
3rd place: @Blufuz

Congratulations to you all! I might be biased but I thought the soaps were especially amazing this month

 

[Catscankim]

Congrats all. They were all so pretty.

 

[Zing]

CONGRATULATIONS to the placers!