Pot o' Gold

This month I made these fun soaps that are perfect for St. Patrick's Day themed decor.  They will be entered into Amy Warden's Soap Challenge for this month, which is all about using natural colorants in soap making.  The guest teacher was Kandra Churchwell. 

Since natural colorants is how we always roll here, I just had to make some artisan soap, and the upcoming holiday gave me a good excuse to use nearly my entire color palette - in addition to encouraging me to try a couple new ideas.

The design idea was to have a pot of gold with a rainbow behind it.  So, I had to make this soap in two steps.  First I started with a rainbow, which I made with a six layered soap square.  I flipped it for the final soap, so it went up vertically from the pot of gold.  These bars are scented with a combination of Rosemary, Grapefruit and Mint.

The colors were obtained as such:

• Purple:  Alkanet infused olive oil (this was an older infusion that was a little weak, so I added a bit of indigo to darken it up a bit)
• Blue:  Indigo in lye
• Green:  Annatto infused olive oil and Indigo lye
• Yellow:  Annatto infused olive oil
• Orange:  Paprika (I wanted to do an infusion, but ended up adding at trace which gives a speckled effect - it's been a crazy month and just didn't have the time...)
• Red:  Rhubarb Root - this is a new one for me, and I'm very excited about the results!

Here are process pictures of the rainbow - I forgot to take a picture of the yellow layer...

Such a beautiful rainbow...I think the best I've achieved to date!

And, of course, I had to proceed to totally ruin it...LOL!

The plan was to cut down the loaf to achieve a semi circular, top of the pot of gold shape, which as you can see started okay on the ends.  However, the blade I was using had a mind of it's own and I got the shape you see there in the middle (I also managed to cut my finger a bit - no blood thank goodness! - so not the best tool for the job!).  I ended up wrenching the blade out of the soap, cutting the loaf into three more manageable sized chunks, fixing the shape to the best of my abilities and then "Frankenstein-ing" the loaf back together.

I then added some texture to the "top of the gold pile" with some carving tools before I poured the yellow (gold) layer, created with annatto seed infused olive oil and a bit of cocoa.  I also forgot to take a picture of this layer...yellow, again, not sure what's up with that!  Then I poured a layer of black for the pot, using bamboo charcoal for the coloring.

This is the end result.  In case you are wondering about those huge cracks...I marked where they were on the side of the mold and cut that area out prior to slicing the rest of the bars.  So, not as much waste as you would think.  Not entirely what I had envisioned, but I do think they turned out quite nice :)