Over the rainbow

The January challenge for the Soap Challenge Club was to produce a soap with a landscape design. It could include animal elements but they had to be a smaller part of the design.

I got the idea of creating a rainbow soap - and I couldn’t let that go. So it wasn’t long before my desk was covered in bits of yellow paper with design ideas.

My original plan was to create a rainbow ending in a pot of gold, with grass, mountains, clouds, rain…

I ended up using the top right design although it wasn’t my first choice.

I had designs the right way up, and upside down… and the first step was to create some soap dough for the rainbow, sun and clouds. I thought of extruding thin pieces for the rain, but let that go.

Seven rainbow colours plus white later, the next step was to make the rainbow.

I added white soap confetti to each layer for a rain effect before rolling out each layer. At this point I realised how hard it would be to create a large continuous rainbow-shaped sandwich, so I made the decision to use my smaller loaf mould - and this scuppered the idea of a curved portion of rainbow ending in a pot of gold. It wouldn’t all fit!

Rainbow pieces were rolled out, cut to roughly mould length and layered with some shape over a glass milk bottle - which was the original plan. Seven layers was a bit of challenge to press evenly. I then used my forearm to create a tighter U shape for the rainbow, to make sure both ends fitted inside the mould.

The sun was made by rolling layers of red orange, gold and yellow soap dough, covered with a layer of gold mica. I used some white soap dough to create lengths of clouds, and last I mixed blues, white and a bit of purple and make it into a wedge to form the river, with what I hoped was the right perspective.

Here they are all set to go. The river is firmly pressed into the mould and ready for the first pour.

I mixed two colours of green for the mountains. And added a bit of gold mica mixed in oil for an in the pot swirl that I hoped would look like flowers in a field of grass.

In hindsight soap confetti would probably have worked better for this.

I used an accelerating fragrance oil to speed up the setting up of the mountains and allow me to shape the mountains above the level of the river.

An earbud came in handy for cleaning up excess batter.

Next up was a layer of light blue for the sky. Then it was time to add the rainbow. I lined it up on the outside to roughly where it would sit, and that’s when I realised that the rainbow was still too large for the mould. Once I had it roughly in place it was at the top of the mould and there was no space for the sun or clouds.

I trimmed the “feet” off the rainbow. Slipped a length of tape under the curve and used that to lower it as evenly as I could onto the mountains before pulling the tape out.

The rainbow was still too high! This was make or break, so I pushed the rainbow deeper and angled it to pour off some of the blue sky under the rainbow. This was not going as planned!

The clouds were squished on top, and the sun to one side, with the blue batter - no space for the swirls I’d planned - followed by some white for more clouds on top and some glitter.

I was very nervous that I had ruined the design by pushing too hard into the mountains, and worried that I had trapped air under the rainbow. But it was in the mould and there was nothing to do but wait.

A few days later - now around 12th January…

The first slice, cutting off the end piece. I love the sun. I hate the clouds. The white “snow” on the mountains - fail; and the white confetti in the rainbow looks like a design flaw. Why did I think that would be a clever idea for rain?

But… apart from that it sort of worked…

Now a little wait for the soap bars to be hard enough to carve, but not too hard.

The next step was to carve out some birds and rain drops to fill in with black and white for an inlaid design to finish it off. I fell in love with the idea of an eagle, but the eagle was really a bit too big, given that the guidelines wanted the landscape to be the feature and any animals a small part of that. So… I did one brave (rebellious) eagle and for the rest I tried to make blue birds (blue birds of happiness to go with the rainbow).

These were filled in with black batter, and then I added white batter to the carved rain drops and decided to leave them as a raised element in the design, rather than smoothing them off (they got a bit lost in the sunlight in the photo below).

I currently have a love - hate relationship with this soap. If I think of what I wanted it to be I am disappointed, but on the other hand if I put my expectations aside it is quite a cool soap.

Well, that wasn’t easy, and I’m glad I got that rainbow soap out my system. I think I’m going to do another easier design just for fun. Thanks to Amy from the Soap Challenge Club for hosting the challenge and to Belinda from Love your Suds for the landscape soap tutorial and tips. It was, as always, a lot of fun and a great learning curve.

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