What a huge, widely varied and crowded challenge! So many incredibly beautiful creations! Reason enough for me to submerge for two weeks, so that I don't have to pick my favourites out of THIS selection
. Joke aside, I really missed the participation in the final sprint. The winners have their trophys well deserved, and I imagine it again was a tight race.
What baffles me is, particularly for the OPWs, that they might look a bit uneven or muddled on the first glance, but once you twinkle a bit, and give your brain the opportunity to see the things not like they are, but like they are supposed to be, it suddenly makes much sense, in an almost impressionistic fashion.
Many thanks also to
@Mobjack Bay for hosting! What could we wish more for, than such a literally professional supervision?
but it has all these white-ish splotches everywhere which my first two attempts also had. I’m guessing these aren’t going through gel phase ‘cos the leftover batter I put in a 1 lb. mold definitely gelled.
I have caught some of these spots too in recent times. Just a bad season for OPW? Let's hope not.
My first reflex is stearic spots, but I'm not entirely sure, though. It seems that, for whatever reason, OPW seems more prone to these than other techniques.
Did anyone else notice that the owl's coconuts float right by the imaginary land of
Magellanica/Magallanica? Apparently it's a good vaykay spot for those of us with
Fernweh for fictional faraway places. I'm always learning something new on SMF.
This was a semi-accident. First off, this is a copy of the
1606 Blaeu world map that is hanging in my room since ages (because, let's be honest, everyone has a world map or a globe somewhere, to get lost in the vastness of our beautiful planet – be it to plan world domination, the next backpack journey, pick the destinations for your rock band's world tour, or just good ol'
Fernweh!).
I intended to “set the story” somewhere inside the most likely original distribution area, that is, southeast Asia/Indian ocean. The Blaeu map (Mercator projection) happened to place the polar maps in the bottom corners, hence the legendary south continent (“terra australis incognita” or “Magellanica”) is placed where modern maps would put Australia. The northern shore of Australia are already there, they just didn't know yet that there was also sea (and quite a lot of it) between Australia and Antarctica proper.
Now that the challenge is over, look how many maritime emojis were yet to be used up!
That one would make a fabulous challenge for a column pour!
CONGRATULATIONS
@Zing 
🎖
Bring it!!!! 
Beautiful soaps everyone, it was tough to vote!
Congrats to 
🛥🛳⛴
⛱
). My reasonable me (and my curing rack) is very glad that one can subscribe only once to each challenge. But who knows which “retry” un-challenges the future will bring?
