Soap Making Rocks
The July challenge for Amy Warden’s Soap Challenge Club was to make a soap version of either marble or river rocks - but the hard part was that they have to look as reaslitic and natural as possible.
I had attempted the marble version earlier this year for another competition and the moulds I would need to use are an odd size, so I wasn’t that inspired to do a marble look-alike. But being an avid rock collector I found it easy to get excited about rocks. I had heaps of examples of local river rocks in my garden - in fact I have a garden border full of them. So river rocks was an exciting choice - and my brain was off in a whirl of thoughts and ideas.
I already had the 6-tray silicone rock moulds, but decided that I wanted to try something I considered more realistic. Although river rocks in my area are smoothish, they’re not really beach-pebble smooth. So I scoured the garden for soap-sized rocks to use to make moulds.
I found four that I liked and eventually found containers they fitted into to contain the silicone. Sadly I only had enough silicone to make three moulds - but that was good enough.
If I could do that over (or had spare silicone - it is hard to find in New Zealand and is ridiculously expensive) I would choose rocks that are slightly less uniform… but part of the rules of the challenge was that the entry soaps need to be similar so I let that sway my choice; while thinking about it now, as long as the colour was similar I’m sure size and shape wouldn’t matter quite as much.
In line with the not entirely smooth texture I had two other ideas I had to try out. Sea sand and sea salt to see if they gave me the look I wanted. I had NZ sea salt in stock. For beach sand, I collected some volcanic beach sand on the weekend after one of our dog walks. I baked it in the oven to sterilise it and poppped it in a container ready for use.
Black sea sand from Taylor’s Mistake beach
Freshly baked and ready for some soap experiments - Yay!
About the same time, I decided to try the soap shred technique - just to see what it looked like.
I had heaps of shreds already saved from planing and trimming soap edges, so I grabbed some in suitable colours and smooshed them together with water. It’s not a bad result and holds together well and is fairly solid when dried. Fun, but not my go-to tecnique for the challenge.
Yesterday (9 July) it was time for attempt one. I had recently sourced some NZ glacial clay which I wanted to try in soap too - so I decided to experiment with a brown and gold layer in some of the rock soaps. My sample stone for this design has some small flecks of yellow gold (see bottom of photo below) - but in hindsight I’m sort of sorry I tried this as it is easy to over do and detracted from the look I was going for (but fortuantely also rubbed off).
Here is my sample river rock - also used for one of the moulds I made.
In the right light the rock has sparkly quartz peices - which is what made me add a few of these rocks to my magpie rock collection.
So, attempt one. I used my standard recipe (olive oil, coconut butter, shea butter, castor oil and cocoa butter). I left most of my batter uncoloured, but prepared a small jug with activated charcol for some black (I wasn’t sure if the sand would be dark enough on its own) and had two small amounts of silver sparkle mica and gold mica to include as mica drizzles.
I divided the batter roughly in three - adding sea salt to one and sea sand to the second and glacial clay (which is a disappointing tan mud brown) dispersed in water into the third. I poured the salt and sand batters simultaenously into a jug so that is was split with white on one side and grey on the other and added some black batter into the gray and silver drizzle into the white and poured my first soap as we did for the clamshell challenge. I then topped the batter in the jug up, added some gold drizzle and poured into the other two homemade moulds.
That was my three special moulds filled. I already knew I was going to regret adding the gold mica drizzle, but there was no way to undo that… the rest of the pour included the glacial clay for a brown look as well using the standard tray of six rock moulds. Some of them worked quite well and some are too overly gold to be realistic (you can see some in the background below) - but overall I was happy that I had achieved a realistic effect for at least six of the batch.
This is my spot the real rocks challenge photo…
There are two real rocks hiding amongst the soap rocks. Can you pick them out?
The light grey on the left and the blurry white rock behind that are the real rocks.
I’m not sure if I will enter these yet. I spent some time wiping as much gold as I could off my two special mould rocks with gold - and apart from not adding the gold, it would also have been closer to the original rock look without the activated charcoal portion - although as a rock in general, as opposed to the specific example, the black isn’t bad.
Today (10 July) I tried to replicate my favourite local river rock. We have a mass of greywacke in the river, but if you look carefully there is an amazing dark purple and green rock, and these are the ones I collect when I’m down at my local river. I knew the pruple would be hard, if not impossible, to match - but I had to try.
This time I tried a comlete salt soap with a 100% coconut oil and 20% superfat, and tried to use Himlayan rhubarb, glacial clay and Brazilian red clay to get the purple - and used a variety of greens and a silver mica drizzle in an attempt the match the verigated look.
This was a bit of a colour-match fail - and didn’t capture the chaos of the verigations either (although some transisions are smoother depending on the rock). I haven’t entirely given up hope as I know the rhubarb darkens over time, but I suspect I haven’t used enough to pull of that off-black purple.
I do like the texture of the all salt batter for a realistic rock-like look through - and being able to unmould after 4 hours to check it out is also a bonus!
A few days later I decided to give the first rocks another go with just salt, sand and a silver mica drizzle - and no black. I went for a 100% coconut oil recipe again.
The results were okay, but probably not as good as the first batch after all. But I do love the texture that the salt and sand give it.
Yes, there are two real rocks in this photo. Bottom left and the very top sandstone brown.
A little later I was chatting to a friend and she suggested layers for the pour - and then I had the idea to try circle pours as well as alternating colours poured from one side of the individual mould to get a more verigated / striped / layered effect.
So the following day I got my colours ready - white, silver drizzle, sand for the grey, with a little black again, and decided to try my usual soap recipe with no salt.
I also decided to use a new-to-me fragrance oil. Reviews said it didn’t accelerate or discolour. Hmmm. Goal of rock hard achieved before I even had the colours mixed. When will I learn that I absolutely have to test a fragrance oil first and not rely on feedback from others?
So, no. I didn’t test my new pour ideas. I spoon plopped the batter into the moulds and squished it down. These were unmoulded within three hours if that gives you any idea of the fragrance acceleration. I scraped the rest of the batter into zip lock bags. I hadn’t planned on trying the option of making river rock soaps from soap dough - but I’m all set up for that now, so I will probably give it a go!
I had to do some cosmetic saves to fill some holes in these soaps. These are not great in my view - but they are passably realistic.
Going back to my botched second colour option. I figured that a Brazilian purple clay would be the closest I would get to that dark purplish colour - so that too was on the agenda for this afternoon. Since I botched the earlier pour, I used this batter to try the concentric circle pour and the from the side pour in different colours.
Because this rock is more chaotic with veins, I also place some dough from the previous batch on the bottom of a couple of indiviual moulds to try to emulate the veining. But apart from achieving a much better colour match (other than the bright green) these were a dismal failure. They would look real pretty cut in half though given how they were poured - but it did not come through to the bottom of the mould or top of the rock.
Ugh! But I did get close to the purple colour-match.
Major ugly duckling award… with zero chance of it turning into a swan. FAR too much lime green. The concentric circles and tiger stripe type pours do not show through and the attempt at veins failed too.
Anyway… while I was imaptiently waiting for the soaps to harden I’ve also played with a few photos of my favourite soaps so far. It is going to be so hard to choose the best soaps and photo!
Real rocks on the extreme left and right, the rest are soap rocks. I can’t enter this photo as it is not just soap. I really love the realistic textured look. Below is a selection of my favourite photos so far. I like the non-square ones best (but square works best for the way it is displayed for the challenge)…
Quite a few photographs later I’ve narrowed the selection down to these four. I like the simple layout because I think it gives the best impression of natural river rocks, but the display doesn’t have any panache. The stone stack is great. The grey background really brings out the natural colours, but the towel looks like a towel... The concrete background looks more natural, but the sunlight makes the gold mica (immitation iron oxide in rocks) look brigther than it is in real life and washes out some of the rock colours. Arrgghhh! I find the photography part of the challenge harder than making the actual soaps!
Update: Yesterday I tried to use the batter that went rock hard to make soap dough rocks. The “dough” was mostly set like rock and didn’t soften enough to work with properly, but I did force-squish four stones together. It required adding water and they’re in the ugly duckling category too.
