Life Lessons in Soapmaking

People often pay lip service to "trial and error" and "learning from mistakes", but the truth of it becomes so clear when making soap. I start out with a concept and a vision of what I want the soap to look like. My inspiration is usually the fragrance or a color combination that I find intriguing. I plan and design and execute and hope and wait. The result doesn't become obvious until I cut the soap into bars, usually the next day. It's like opening a gift - exciting, but not always what I was expecting. The color might be wrong, or the texture might be funky. But even when I get more "error" in my trials then I'd want, I can still end up with a fine piece of soap. Plus the lesson learned. It may not be what I wanted (or thought I wanted), but it's still just fine.

So here are the results of my latest trials (check out this post for some background thoughts about the designs).


The larkspur petals on the top stayed blue, but any petals that actually touched the soap turned yellow. At least they're not brown! So I think that the best use for these will be on top of the soap.

The embedded slices look good so far. They came from a two-color bar, so the effect is pretty nice. I'll have to wait to see how they hold up in use.


You can see the faint gold mica line in the middle of this bar. The fragrance oil in this one will cause the soap to turn a medium brown, so I'm hoping that looks a bit more dramatic eventually.


And these are some cute little soaps that I made. The plan is to embed them in a new batch of soap and see how that works. So cute.

Pretty successful trials, overall. I'm already planning some more for next week!