When will I learn

If I want to follow someone else's idea, I need to do it while watching their Youtube video, or reading their instructions, not 3 weeks later from memory, because as I said, I don't have the memory of an elephant, or even of a 5 year old.

There was a beautiful gem soap on Youtube which I wanted to emulate, but good grief Charlie Brown, it helps to know how she did it in the first place!

This turned out not the way I wanted (gee, seems to be a recurring theme with me) but again it's a learning process. I wanted a thin stripe of black to contrast between colours, but after cutting out parts, it wasn't turning out, so I just left a whole part black instead. Also, not using all clear soap made it look less gem-like.

Scented with Rocky Road Fudge

Another live and learn session. I found a really cool tutorial on Pinterest (and this time remembered to pin it even!) on how to make cool gem soaps, so off I go to try that!

What's your minimum time you can spend on Pinterest? To me it's like Lay's chips, can't stop at one pin.

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