Soap surprises

One of the most fun and frustrating parts of soap crafting is not having any clue what your soap bars will end up looking like. Sure, you can guess based on your colors and swirling techniques that you're planning to use. But when you're trying a new method for the first time, or you're testing a fragrance oil that ends up seizing horribly, you just have to hope for the best. Then you get to wait 24 hours before you can cut the bars to see if they look surprisingly gorgeous, filled with air bubbles, or completely different from what you were expecting.

Recently, I made a watermelon cold process soap. I blended three shades of red/pink pigments in order to get the watermelon flesh color that I wanted. I was planning to include some drizzles of black horizontally across the loaf, so that it would look like seeds. However, I had not anticipated how much the black drizzles would spread. Instead of little black seeds, I ended up with black lines going through my bars. As I saw the black batter spreading as I was putting it into the mold, I knew it wasn't going to look the way I wanted it to. I still think the soap looks nice overall, but I will probably skip the black next time. Maybe poppy seeds would work better instead?

Regardless of how my soaps end up, peeling the paper off of my loafs and then cutting that first bar off makes all the work worth it. It's like opening a present that you worked really hard for. And most of the time, I am pleasantly surprised. :)