Warning, long post ahead! I promise I'll eventually come to the un-challenge part of it somewhere near the bottom. Don't wonder if you've seen one or the other step beforehand, I've shared them every now and then, but I wanted to combine all into one post for easier reference. I'm too lazy rn to find all the reference comments, and will refer to other threads only exceptionally.
[I'm counting rebatch/confetti levels, though]
Disclaimer No. 2: This soap is not intended to be “beautiful” or “pretty”, it's rather another appraisal of the material qualities of several soap varieties, as well as some experimental challenge, tackling aspects of soap behaviour that might be more or less conscious to the curious soapmaker.
For not overly surprising reasons, soap scraps and confetti are an evergreen among soapmakers. Several months ago, I've decided to compact and upcycle these into something of further use.
First step: sorting scraps by colour:
The snapped yellowish sausages on the left are in fact microwave-rebatched blends of sunflower castile and
red palm oil soap that faded just a bit too much for my original plans with them
[Confetti level 1].
I put both into airtight containers and wetted/softened them with 10% water over days/weeks. Grated down the pale ones first, to make the resulting ex-post soap dough smoother.
After thorough rehydration, I rolled the coloured scraps into balls of roughly similar size:
The various soaps were of very different softness (some still rock hard, some nearly slimy-liquidy), but I didn't care, since all that was important was the shape as of now.
The pale scraps gave a lovely soap dough
[Confetti level 2], suitable to be formed into asparagus-like storage shapes,
performing soundchecks, or worse:
Rabbit hole!
About that time
@Mobjack Bay posted of
cylindrical mould honeycomb soap, and I instantly fell in love with that idea!
So I prepared a Pringels can with bubblewrap, melted up the asparagus dough
into a HP batch, and prepared for The Big Rebatch/Confetti Party:
Soap balls, pre-heated in the oven (to reduce risk of early solidification of HP batter during pouring)
The soap cylinder, cast and unmoulded.
[Confetti level 3] Not overly happy with the rugged look, but everyone who ever has bothered to rebatch knows what a huge pain it is to even get to such a point, lol.
Of course things haven't been complicated enough, so I also added sunflower butter as post-cook superfat to give
chlorogenic green a shot to turn the HP/rebatch matrix green over time. The success? Well, after a few weeks it's become a tiny bit greener than concrete at least…
You can see the broad and narrow stips of bubblewrap (I'll have to repeat this with CP one time). The ball embeds are cut open, and expose their cheerful content to the public, from which some is from previous monthly SMF challenges (sushi nori/rice, OPW indigo, paprika salmon,…). Note how the brown blob at the top (rich in red palm oil) has started bleeding into the matrix – we'll come back to this later on.
Now it's eventually time to fast-forward to July and the actual (un)challenge!
The soap base is intended to be made in the month of the challenge, so I dusted my propylene glycol bottle, and made some M&P base (this time only from new oils, no confetti level increment).
Unfortunately I have no photos from the process, but it was fun to exploit something that might be called “HTCP” (high-temperature cold process): heat/melt up the oils (palm stearin, canola wax, PKO as hard oils), dissolve lye
and polyols in a double-walled thermos mug, add the oils, stir thoroughly until emulsion is reached, and then let it stand to keep warm under heat of the reaction, and liquid under the accelerating and diluting properties of the polyols. After a few hours, I had a can of finished M&P base, melted under its own reaction heat, ready to be used as-is.
Time for
[Confetti level 4]! This time rather conservative confetti, with a dollhouse-size cheese grater. Confettifying some of the above colourful soaps, I roughly sorted the shavings by colour.
Then I filled the small round PE bottle with hot water (to delay M&P solidification), placed it into the open square bottle, and alternated between adding molten M&P base and soap shavings, one colour at a time. You can see what a terrible job I did at how it came out:
[cliffhanger … to be continued in the next post, since I have reached the maximum 10 pics to attach]
(PS, my photographer sucks)View attachment 59643
Rabbit hole!
Soap balls, pre-heated in the oven (to reduce risk of early solidification of HP batter during pouring)
The soap cylinder, cast and unmoulded. [Confetti level 3] Not overly happy with the rugged look, but everyone who ever has bothered to rebatch knows what a huge pain it is to even get to such a point, lol. 
. Not so much the colour, that's meh (but I have to sugargoat it, given how much of my grey-green marble soap I'm sitting on…). But I actually like the “impossible” shape of the hole with a “levitating” plug in the middle.
This was scented with Somali Soul by Nurture Soaps. It’s very strong and reminds me of Lush-type scents.
I like these a lot, next time I’m gonna add a little madder at trace for some pink speckles. They’re scented in a blend of wild flower, wild Berry, and wild woods. 
