February SMF Challenge Entry Thread- Soap Stones

[newbie]

Please enter your photo/photos of your soap stone. Any information you wish to share about your technique, colorants, FO are always welcome.

Please do not make comments in this thread. If you wish to make a remark about the entries, please do so on the original challenge thread.

ENTRIES ONLY!

 

[szaza]

Ok I'll go first this month.. even though my 'transparant' soap was hardly translucent, it still gave me the effect I wanted to get. Here's my entry for this month:
Winter Is Coming! - obsidian arrowhead guest soaps.
Translucent soap colored with activated charcoal and scented with a fresh/wintery blend of peppermint, eucalyptus, pine and clove (a variation on 'highbrow' from EOcalc)

(It took me a while to figure out how to properly carve arrowheads out of soap)

 

[Misschief]

I don't think I'll have the time, or energy, to put together another try so this will be my entry for this month. I have a dish of stones at my desk and of the dozen or so, three of them are Amethyst so I decided to try to duplicate it. It's scented with Black Tie but it's very faint. I've also included a picture of the entire batch, which yielded four bars. Two of the bars were cut up to create stones. Only one rock was made as I just don't have the energy to do more right now.

ETA: So, I'm feeling much better today and realized I really didn't give much information about the process. It's, basically, an ITP (in the pot) swirl with two shades of purple (Ultramarine Purple) and TD. After letting it set for a bit, I did try newbie's technique but didn't have the patience or energy to do to much with it. Once I knew I had at least a couple "cracks", I put it to bed to gel. I wanted to get that translucent look that the amethyst rock has. It. would. NOT. gel. At all. I put it in the oven. I put it in my wooden boxes with a Magic Bag, reheated the Magic Bag. Nothing. I finally gave up and went to have a nap.

I also wanted to include another picture (the original picture is fine for my entry pic) just to show what I ended up with at the end.

Oh, and the other mini pebbles are soap stones I made about a year ago.

 

[Meena]

bumping the thread so challenge entrants can find it

 

[Terri E]

This is my entry I carved my stones from pieces of soap and soap dough. I made 3 layers and in the middle layer (orange and pink) added some butterflies I made from soap dough as a little surprise. I rolled some of the cut soap in gold mica to add a bit of sparkle! It is scented with Spearmint & Eucalyptus

 

[Meena]

Ok! My 8th soap batch is my challenge entry. It was a lot of fun, so thank you for the great idea, @newbie!

I love rocks and crystals, and own at least 100 different ones. I really like seeing how they sometimes form together in matrices, and my entry is meant to suggest large, mostly raw pieces of chrysocolle with malachite.

ETA: Reference pic



Here it is before the cuts.

First test stone. Oh yeah, this is gonna work! Woo hoo!

Here are the other soap stones I made by cutting the loaf in a variety of ways, and hand-moulding the pieces.

I'm torn which to choose for voting: SO likes this first rounded one, and I like the second tallish piece. Or should I enter the plate with several pieces? Aaarrghhh!
Maybe you could decide on one for me, @newbie ?

 

[Carolyne Thrasher]

Here’s my entry

Edit:

So here’s some info about these soaps. They are soleseife made from Oregon coast seawater collected on the day of the last super moon which I think was also a blood moon and there was a corresponding king tide.

I used coffee grounds to get the speckled look. Oxides, clays and micas mixed until I had the colors I wanted. And I did use a soap shaped mold.

 

[newbie]

bump

 

[Dawni]

The main reason I wanted to start soaping is so I could make something "natural" for the three most important people in my life - my baby, my teenager and my mom.

One of my first soaps was for my eldest, Darren, to help with his acne (and male odor lol) problem, and with great advice from this forum, made him one that seems to be working better than any previous soap.

This is his second batch. The first batch was a plain dark brown but I've always told myself that I should make him a nice swirly one next. I also need this soap to cure before he runs out of the first, so this challenge came at the right time and hit both points.

This is a soap with high(er) amounts of neem oil, hence the color, and a high(er) amount of grapeseed oil, with a dash of black seed oil as well. Contrasting colors are from activated charcoal and titanium dioxide.

Here's his chunky bar of soap.

I struggled staging these inside the house, to get the right light and an ok surface for a background. Here's what that struggle resulted in.

The picture right above is using another two batches of trial stones. I decided not to enter them because they felt like cheating to me lol One was a rebatch in which I pushed a lighter, fresh soap into the cracks by hand. Another is posted in this forum, just scrap pieces from several fresh soaps hand pressed and molded into stones. But together, they look nice like a real pile of stones.

Moving on, here's what the same pile looked when I had a doh! moment and realized (belatedly lol) that I had a ton of stones outside in the garden.

And now we come to my actual entry.. And I'm hoping I won't regret using this one lol the competition so far is awesome and I'm worrying my widdle stones pale in comparison.

Oh btw, these are very mildly scented, coz to me nothing screams more earth than the natural scent of neem oil lol. And when I added the black seed oil... Well, some of you can probably imagine hehe. Lemongrass, Cedarwood (Darren's favorite) and Rosemary EOs complement this neem & black seed earthy scent.

Thank you to @newbie for this awesome challenge, and thanks to everyone for reading. I wish us all luck, my fellow competitors!

 

[KiwiMoose]

Three stones for the price of one! In my efforts to achieve a 'granite' look, I have managed to get a 'travertine' top, a 'marble' bottom, and (what i wanted in the first place) a granite centre. Am I selling it to you yet? Nah - didn't think so
Used Black raspberry and Vanilla scent which is DIVINE, but it caused the batter to yellow, whereas I thought it would go more of a tan and thus contribute to the colour of the granite - maybe it will in time?
To achieve the granite look I passed all the colours in succession though a colander ( messy stuff!)
Anyway, here are my granite slabs:

 

[dibbles]

For my entry, I tried to do newbie's fissured stone technique. The two bars are my result, with the fissure being the darkest brown color (in case you couldn't tell ). The cairn stones were made from cutting a soft bar from the batch and squishing the soap into stone shapes. The fragrance is Cedar and Saffron from Brambleberry. Colorants used were Mocha Brown and Bronze brown micas from Nurture, Satin White from Micas and More and some uncolored batter with the discoloring fragrance. Thank you newbie for hosting this month!

 

[Jstheidi]

Here is my try in my first ever challenge. I’m new to soap making and still learning a lot by hanging out on this forum. I made these with my basic recipe and used instant coffee for coloring and did the best I could for pictures. I found a few rocks outside and brought them in and put them all together for the 1st picture.

 

[Primrose]

Here is my attempt at the fissure technique and at creating some amazonite stones.

Amazonite photo for reference

My soap stones

I would like to try the technique again as it didn't really work as well as I'd like, but not sure when I'll have time so uploading these now. I feel like I'm not really good at squishing them into a stone shape either.

These are scented with BB Coastal Rain which is supposed to accelerate but didn't. It's also my first attempt at a shampoo bar (using the famous recipe from this forum) so I'm really keen to try it out.

 

[MarnieSoapien]

The look I was going for was Red Jasper (photo 1 is for reference). I used the failed-fissure-technique/smoosh-the-pieces-into-rock-like-shapes method. I achieved the colors with Red Iron Oxide, Titanium Dioxide and Black Iron Oxide, I also used Cherry and Driftwood FOs. I had a lot of fun with this challenge and am so glad that I got to participate!

 

[midnightsoaper]

I have a cabochon mold, so I set out to make little decorative travel/handsoap cabochons. They aren't very practical because they're pretty tiny (only the large oval would work, the smaller ones were just using up leftover soap dough). But they're stones Three kinds of turquoise, pinolith, and spiderweb obsidian (the malachite was too intimidating!). All are made with soap dough & micas/AC.

Here are the inspiration photos I used...

And my small soap cabochons...

 

[zanzalawi]

I’ve made river stones!

These bars are from my first batch of salt bars. I made them in a pvc pipe and I waited way too long to cut them, broken crumbly messes!
They were colored with “50 shades” mica from WSP. The batch was split into two, one part was colored a light grey and the smaller part a dark grey. I tried to swirl them as I poured them into the pipe

I’d been using one of the bars in the shower and it had worn down, was reminding me of a river stone. And then I saw @newbie feb challenge announcement haha!

I soaked a few bars in the sink for a bit so they’d be easier to carve up. I trimmed them down, filed them. when they were about the right size and shape I was happy with I took a green scrubby pad and scoured them and polished them to their stony perfection. Like carving the “David” out of a block of marble, right!?! LOL

In the mountains around where I live, when you go hiking you find little cairns of river stones left about by folks. I played around with these, trying to stack them for a long time haha, They really are quite slippery and weren’t at all easy to stack!

Anyways, I’m glad I got to do something fun with this botched batch, thank you Newbie

 

[newbie]

Last day for entries!

 

[SaltedFig]

Stone Horse

Scratchings
One eye
Rough cuts
Depth carving
Mane outline
The other side
Horsing around in the soap dust
Top view

Stone Soap Horse

 

[SideDoorSoaps]

I almost carved all my soap stone away trying to get what I wanted. This is an overflow from a loaf batch that I poured into a round silicone mold. This is my tea tree and may Chang blend colored with titanium dioxide and activated charcoal.

from the loaf mold.

Before the carving began.

side 1

side 2

I was hoping for a more dramatic marbling being in the small circle mold I though I swirled it more. It reminded me of high end marble coasters.

 

[newbie]

Here is the link to the survey:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FB7BGNR

Passwords have been sent. Let the voting begin!