February Challenge Entry Thread

newbie · Feb 18, 2018

Wow, that went by quickly.

Don't worry if you aren't ready yet because you can enter your soap through February 25th.

Please post a picture of your soap in process and your finished result. If you did an embed, I'll need a pic of your process, of the embed itself, and of the finished bar.

Please do NOT comment on this thread but feel free to on the main one. This for ENTRIES ONLY.

dibbles · Feb 19, 2018

After many attempts utilizing different techniques (with not a lot of success), this is what I was able to make. I covered an old bar of soap with soap dough, made the eye and went from there. I twisted different colored dough into a rope to give multiple colors for each 'feather' and gave them texture by scratching with a manicure tool. Photos of the process and my inspiration picture.

SoapAddict415 · Feb 20, 2018

I wanted to make something for my son's upcoming wedding. The wedding colors are royal purple & charcoal grey. My purple isn't the right shade but I'm sure they'll love it. I made 3 different canes, sliced them & overlaid the pieces. I then rolled it flat & cut pieces to fit on top of my individual molds. The soap underneath is plain & scented with a custom black cherry blend. The bars with 4 colors have pieces of my attempt at a MP soap dough.

scard · Feb 21, 2018

I was in a Victorian mood after seeing the Greatest Showman, and here are the results.

I had a lot of fun with this, trying all kinds of new things. I made the base loaf colored with activated charcoal and included a few embeds of clear M&P colored with metalic micas. I used the soap dough for all of the decorative elements on the soap. The gears and hardware were antiqued with a wash of charcoal in alcohol.(like to video posted)

I did have alot of trouble getting the dough firm enough to use, I have to pick up some more cornstarch now.
I have a lot of texture tools from a past polymer habit and if I could have gotten a better texture it would have gone much quicker and easier.

I will keep experimenting. :goodbye1:

artemis · Feb 21, 2018

As usual, "I wasn't going to enter, but..." I was looking at those soaps with the mermaid tails in the tops. I have no interest in buying a mold for such a thing. Suddenly, it occurred to me that if I used soap dough, I could have any size and shape as I want! They wouldn't even have to be mermaid tails! I'm all about customizing. So, after a detour through the world of squirrels (I'll post them in the other thread), I ended up back at mermaids. The idea for this lady came from a video tutorial on making a fondant mermaid cake topper.

The dough is the Sorcery Soap recipe. I divided and colored the dough (cocoa powder brown, red oxide/TD pink, AC/TD gray) and bagged them. When I wanted blue or purple, I just worked mica into a little if the gray clay. I also added a few drops of peppermint, just to enhance my own enjoyment while working with the dough.

The dough feels great in the hands. It holds it's shape nicely while working it. A little corn starch in a make-shift pouncing bag helped it not get too sticky. The blessing/curse: once you leave the piece you're working on alone, it starts to set up. My "open time" was not very long at all. With some of the polymer clays, they are so soft that the design is easily lost while handling. Others are so stiff that they are hard to model. This was just right, and the fact that it firmed up as I went was a benefit, since I wasn't accidentally destroying what I made as I went. But, my first attempt at hair got hard too fast and just broke into pieces.

I didn't use a lot of my clay tools, but I was glad I had them on hand. I made a little "paint" from isopropyl alcohol and TD and AC etc for the eyes and mouth. A tiny star-shaped clay cutter made my sea stars. My youngest, Pax, gave me the idea for the octopus tentacles. On the advice in the tutorial, I used a spaghetti noodle to anchor her head on to her body. I think that's everything you need to know?

SunRiseArts · Feb 22, 2018

well, I am going to post mine. Although I had so much trouble with my soap dough, that is not smooth as I wanted. I had no reference, so is just from my heart, a heart soap angel.

If I make soap and safe some batter, I may change her.

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artemis · Feb 22, 2018

Since I forgot to take pictures along the way, I reenacted the making of the mermaid tail for your viewing pleasure (let me know if the link works). For the real tail, I used a straw to make the scales, and I took my time shaping the tail. The white powder is just cornstarch.

Serene · Feb 22, 2018

Tittle: Odd Man Out

Core: Melt and Pour
Dough: Lard Based
Colorants: Nurture's Micas
Scent: None
Technique: Caning and Layering

neonstudy · Feb 22, 2018

Here is my entry, my first time with soap dough. I made a floral cane, and wasn't too happy with how it came out, so ended up making some simple flowers. It's scented with Femme Fatale from Nurture soap.

Roselyne · Feb 23, 2018

My entry is The Lily Pond, stones at bottom made using the faux funnel technique, frog in soap dough, tried my hand at the ombre technique (hum, well...), lilies, buds and leafs made with soap dough. Soap is fragance with raspberry and gardenia fragance.

Prep:

jewels621 · Feb 23, 2018

My less-than-artistic impression of myself was totally validated by soap dough, but I’m entering anyway because, darn it, I did it. This was inspired by my need for warm weather while looking outside at my hip high snowbanks. My sad little poppies made me happy, though.....until my hilarious husband decided that they look like old pepperoni with nipples. I’m still laughing, and that’s how I will forever view them now. I’m not sure soap dough is for me. I spent inordinate amounts of time overthinking everything, and in the end decided to keep it simple. TD base with poppy seeds and a Lime Appeal (Nurture) mica line. Scented with Elements of Bamboo from MMS.

Misschief · Feb 23, 2018

It took a while for inspiration to hit and, even at the last minute, I was trying to come up with a way to pull it all together.

1. Bits and pieces. My husband would have sampled them if I hadn't been around to tell him they were soap.

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Misschief
Feb 23, 2018

2. More bits, including the embeds

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Misschief
Feb 23, 2018

3. In the mold

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Misschief
Feb 23, 2018

4. Unmolded. My layers didn't quite turn out as planned because my batter thickened up a little faster than anticipated.

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Misschief
Feb 23, 2018

5. All the soaps. The "candies" are unscented soap dough. The bars are scented with Sweet Fennel EO and really do smell good enough to eat.

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Misschief
Feb 23, 2018

6. And my final entry.

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Misschief
Feb 23, 2018
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BattleGnome · Feb 24, 2018

My entry is not as overtly creative as some of the others but I did learn a ton from it.

The idea was to make snakes and roll them out to look a bit like knit fabric on top of my soap. My in progress picture looks a bit like my goal but the snakes were a bit too thick to have definition on the bars. I am oddly pleased with my accidental butterfly swirl though.

First time using crisco in my recipe, looking forward to see how that turns out. The brown is a mix of cuppachino mica and espresso FO. I attempted to gel my soap but I’m not sure if it actually did - the colors are exactly the same as when I poured and despite the beginning of over heating on one of my overflow molds there was a bit of sticking for that bar.

dxw · Feb 25, 2018

Swampwater
The idea was a frog peeping-up from the water through a blanket of duckweed. It's a red-eyed tree fog, which probably would not place itself in such a situation ... but has far cooler eyes to model. The bar underneath was trying to symbolise bubbling fermenting happenings in the brackish swamp water. The bar is CP with soap-dough inserts and I poured a M&P layer on top of it to mount the frog and the duckweed, which are soap dough with dough-gloop used as glue.
My second month of soaping, and my first 'challenge' ... and ooooh boy what a challenge it was..

Primrose · Feb 25, 2018

I have no idea if my entry counts or not, because its not yet out of the mould and I get confused with the time differences just when it actually closes lol. So I will put some photos up here and if I get time before it closes will add a photo of the cut.

I am very farm-animal minded and intended to just make a barnyard full of animals. But it didn't feel very creative or inspired.

I was at the grocery store and saw a tub of duck fat ... And inspiration struck. My first thought was "I could make a soap with that and call it quacktastic" (bonus points if you get the movie reference). The idea niggled at me and snowballed and I ended up with ducks in a pond, with a duck fat based soap. Will be interesting to see how it performs.

I initially just made white soap dough as I didn't know what I wanted to do. I coloured the dough by kneading mica into it; in hindsight next time I will colour it from the start as it was hard to get an even distribution of colour. My dough recipe was just a standard 50% lard 25% olive 20% coconut 5% castor, unscented.

I made the duckies first. Here's some photos of colouring the dough and making the embeds. The white one was my 'prototype duck'

The base of the soap as I mentioned contains duck fat. It is mainly white, with a blue layer on top and hopefully a drop swirl inside. I hadn't planned the drop swirl, I'd actually planned on texturing the white layer but was getting impatient waiting for it to set up enough. I've never tried a drop swirl. I scented the base with monkey farts as I find it accelerates and I was hoping that would work in my favor, helping it set up enough to support the embeds.

Final photo is just an overflow soap (not my entry) but pays homage to the scene from the movie that sparked my inspiration ... I couldn't not make at least one blue duck!