The soap meltdown

This soap was a melt and pour recipe. I love to cut tiny little square out of color coordinating mp soap and drop them in to create a lovely geometric look to my soaps. It's like Christmas morning to me when I am slicing one of these loaves. I will slice it and say "oh, Look at that one!" slice another and say "oh wow! this one is even better" till finally, I am done. I pick my favorites for photos of course. Any plain or not sticking pieces go into my bath collection and the rest are sold to my customers. The contrast is what makes this method appealing to me. I love to use it with a clear base, dyed with matte or sparkle black mica powder. The cubes just pop right out at you. Since I always use a butter base soap for my cubes, (glycerine alone is very drying in my opinion), I can never get the full effect of bright vivid colors that I aspire to see.

After the colors are chopped into cubes I put them in a larger bowl and mix the colors up as evenly as possible. I pour my melted base soap about 3/4 of the way up to my fill line. If you do not allow for the cubes, your soap will be an overflowing mess. I spritz the cubes really good with alcohol and pour them in. The timing is everything when it comes to most all soap techniques. If your pour it all in to fast they will settle on the bottom. That will look just fine, lovely in fact. If you are wanting the suspended look your going to have to wait it out a little longer.I keep stirring the soap to keep the top layer from forming. Then I add a layer then pause for short time then add some more. I also sprinkle a layer on top. Make sure you keep up with the alcohol spritzing, especially on the top layer of they will not attach to the soap properly. Now the Egyptian Amber soap. This scent is such a favorite this time of year. Out of all the amber scents I have found, Egyptian Amber has always brought me back. It goes over big with most of my warm, earthy customers too. I was going for the same effect with this layer. What I was attempting to pull off was a pyramid look going through the center of the soap. Oh, it was going to be gorgeous! But reality set in and I have two very small children who could care less about what my soaps end up looking like and I waited to long and the soaps barely sunk past the top layer. Devastated, I mashed and I pushed, and the cubes just sat there... still on top. I walked away and took a tiny break and it hit me. So I grab up my heat gun, filled up my bottle of alcohol and go at it. Careful not to burn my mold or myself of course. I would melt and spritz until the whole top layer looked marbleized. I was so pleased. At the very end I sprinkled a few more cubes to give it some depth. Wa~lah! beautiful soap. Of course torching everything that doesn't turn out is not the best advice in the world but in this case, the results were perfect. Make sure the colors contrast well too, if they are to similar they may just bleed into one.