I decided to try a simpler landscape design, just for fun - and soon discovered that simple doesn’t mean particularly easy. The idea was a mountain nightscape with black through to dark blue mountains. A touch of off-white to light blue outlining the mountains, fading quickly into navy then black for the night sky - with a drizzle of metallic mica on top for stars - and the option to mica paint more stars if I thought that would work.

This was a last-minute decision. As much as I would have like to have added a full moon or a quarter moon embed the only pre-made embed I had was a blue heart - so no embed for this one. Yes, simple was the goal.

I set about preparing my usual batch, pre-mixed my colours, with lots of extra containers on standby so I could pour off and mix colours, and an accelerating fragrance oil. I used Christmas Cabin from Zen Designs.

I soaped at 50 degrees C. Mixed to emulsion and took a guess at how much I would need of each colour. This was also my first time using a liquid blue for the darker blue colours (available from Aussie Soap Supplies and Lotus Oils for NZ). I have used the red before and discovered that you can’t just hand mix this like you can with prepared micas. It needs a fair whiz with the stick blender - glad I found that out in advance for this soap.

Layer one - black for the closer mountains. The black batter was poured off, reserving some for the top. Fragrance was added and hand-mixed in. It didn’t set up as quickly as I had hoped so I dived into the essential oil drawer to find my clove oil (which thankfully works well with the fragrance). After mixing in a few drops of clove oil it was starting to thicken. Layer one was poured but still took a while before it was firm enough to be scraped.

I used the corner of a small piece of rectangular plastic to scrape out a V shape. The batter was still too soft to scrape well - but I was starting to panic about the rest of the soap setting up before finishing my design.

Another five minutes and I was able to do a passable scrape - at least on 3/4 of the loaf. The end I was scraping towards was not as well defined - I was adding the scraped excess to the sides of the mould to build up the mountainsides.

Layer two - dark blue. I split off some dark blue. Added a bit of black batter, fragrance and clove oil. Popped the mould on an angle and poured to fill the indent and build up a mountain on one side.

Layer three - a lighter dark blue. The mould was angled the other way for the pour. Once it started to set I used a spatula to create a V-effect in the middle and build up to the sides.

In hindsight, both the blues should have been a lot darker for the look I wanted. Adding black will work for next time!

Layer four - a just off-white-blue was drizzled down from both sides of the mould. I left this layer and the next fragrance-free because I couldn’t reliably remember if the fragrance discolours.

Layer five - a slightly darker very light blue was poured down both sides of the mould.

Layer six - more blue. This blue should have been much darker and graduated to black. I tried adding a swirl of purple mica in oil to this batch to add some interest and colour. The lack of fragrance in the lighter blues had the unplanned effect of adding a lighting look. With the batter being more fluid it created a bit of a pointy layer effect reaching up to the darker layers.

Layer seven - black. For some reason, some of the blue kept rising as I poured and I ended up frantically spooning the black batter on top to try and cover the blue.

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