I'm ready for my photoshop, Mr. De Spielberg

What's more fun than mixing metaphors? Mixing names. Yeah right. I need to find something a little more entertaining.

As Cee mentioned in her post a couple of weeks back, it's getting more difficult to take pictures with natural lighting now that it's become more scarce. Natural lighting in my house is iffy at the best of times, so I turn to my friend, Picasa.

I use Picasa to put more light on my pictures that the window just doesn't allow for, and to crop the pictures to focus on the soap which I'm not very good at with my little point and shoot.

Embeds, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

There are lots of posts on how to make your own lightbox, which I need to do one of these days because those shadows are darned annoying.

The other soap I made this week was inspired by what I saw on Pinterest for men's soap. This one in particular made me go wow. Mine didn't turn out as well, and not just because it's not CP soap. Did you know you can actually have your soap so hot that it melts the plastic mould? I'm really overdue to get a thermometer.

But it smells good at least. Beau Brummel, one of my favourite scents.

And last but not least, I got another order for the alphabets. So I've gotten a good start on it, I think.

Stay dry (at least if you're on the west coast) and have a great week!

Diamond in the rough

It's a good thing I have people who follow my blog. It pushes me to try something different each week and allows me to say I accomplished something rather than just sitting around watching tv all weekend.

Two weeks ago, I made some gemstone soaps, and in the comments, Anne-Marie said " I could see you doing so much with the gemstone soaps" which got me thinking. I remembered seeing a post on Otion's blog about making geodes and I wondered how I could use their idea and make it my own.

Good thing I started this experiment early in the week because it was not working the way I wanted. After some thought, and re-reading the post again, I decided on a variation of how they did their geodes. Also I wasn't wanting a geode per se, but rather to look like a gem was being mined. 

I melted clear soap and mixed in some black lustre mica (oooh shiny!) and dipped the gem soap into it. I thought it'd be like working with chocolate, where you have to get a thin layer on and keep building it up slowly. Eventually I worked it out that if I set the gem into the black soap, and let it partially set, it would come out in bigger chunks. In the second gem, I added some activated charcoal to give the "rock"more blackness.

Dipping the gemstone into liquid soap. Hard to have something to hang onto!

I have a friend who works in the Earth Science department, I think she might get a kick out of these. What fun things did you get up to this last week?

Finished "sapphire"-ish gemstone

My diamond in the rough

Let them wash with cake

Maybe that's what Marie Antoinette was meant to have said.

I'm not normally big on sweets, but every so often I crave something decadent. Being that there's only two of us in this household, it doesn't make much sense to make a cake to feed 16 people (much as hubby would love to see that). To combat my sweets craving, I decided to try my hand at an opera cake, but in soap form.

For anyone who's unfamiliar with an opera cake, here's an example.

Photo from indulgy.com

I started it by pouring the layers into the mould (gotta love clear moulds) and then cutting it down so I could pour the "icing" over it after. This time I made sure to give each layer plenty of time to set before I poured the next one so that they wouldn't meld into one another.

Naked "opera cake" soap. Rated I for immature humour

I tried to make my "frosting" a bit darker by adding in some charcoal but it just made the colouring murky. So to compensate, I added more bakery beige colouring from Soapy Love's tart kit. Maybe next time I'll use straight clear soap rather than a mix of clear and white. The scent is rocky road fudge. 

After cutting it, it looks more like a Kit Kat bar to me, but opera cake sounds much more sophisticated.

Back to Basics

I was thinking that I should start each of my posts from now on with some random thought that's completely unrelated to soaping, but thank your lucky stars, I'm too darned lazy even though I'd formulated everything in my head already.

Seeing how last week's soaping experiment didn't go quite as planned, I thought I'd make something simpler this time, thinking it'd work so much better. Each time I try something new, it just reminds me that I gotta practice, practice practice.

My first set of soaps for this week went okay, but how can you go wrong with making single colour melt and pour?

Next time, more sparkles!

I wanted to use up some of the leftover soaps I have which is why I created this little project as well.

I was hoping for a clearer delineation between the colours, but otherwise, a perfectly useable soap.

What did you do for fun this weekend?