I soaped two batches today, the first was watermelon. Oh wow was this a FUN soap to make!! I cut up one of my favorite soaps for ’seeds’ before I even mixed my lye water. The soap I cut up is called sinful and its almost black with a creamy grey black swirl- just like watermelon seeds! I planned three layers, which is very ambitious. I placed my main portion of my soap mixture in a larger bowl and added in dye and fragrance and away we went! I added some green to a small portion I had set aside and titanium dioxide to another small portion I had also set aside. So I set to work getting the green mixture to a thick trace. It went beautifully! Next I needed to move onto the white layer. But snap! the red layer was looking extreemly orange from the fragrance oil. I was a bit worried. But continued onto the white layer. Got it to the correct trace and poured it ontop of the green. So far so good! Then I turned my attention onto the now dark orange layer…..well there are orange melons out there….right? Not much I can do at this point but continue on, saponification does wierd things, so I cna only hope for the best! I brought it to trace poured about half and then scattered some of the ’seeds’ and poured the rest and put it to bed. When I peaked an hour ago it was deep deep red! Just like a nice ripe juicey watermelon!! I can only hope the other layers turned out half as well! This is definatly a BOLD soap!
Afterwards I cleaned up and started on a beautiful oil, Stephanotis. Florals very often excellerate trace and therefore shouldnt be swirled or layered, they just need to be slammed together as cooly as possible. But I soap at room temperature and have a couple other tricks up my sleeve to keep things from moving too fast. I ended up swirling it with just a touch of green. It smells devine! I didnt have any problems with it moving too quickly.