Mile High Majesty

Soap Challenge Time!
This month's technique is Sculptured Layers, with a theme inspired by a landscape, such as a park, monument or other well known famous or historical place.  I've been wanting to attempt a silhouette of Denver for a long time, and thought this would be a good opportunity to give it a shot.

First off, a big THANK YOU to Amy Warden for providing this challenge (see more about this HERE), and to Roxanne Moore of Caprica Soapery as this month's guest teacher!

Below is a picture of the soap made by Roxanne during the tutorial, inspired by the Egyptian Pyramids.  A beautiful, soapy creation indeed!

Now, I have attempted sculpted layers in the past, without a whole lot of success.  The biggest hurdle, I felt, was the lack of good scraping tools.  I've tried cardboard, foam board and plastic mats, with varying degrees of success.  Very simple designs tend to work fairly well, but I always tend to try something overly complicated, which is the second reason for my failed attempts.  Keep it simple!  Did I follow this rule this month....uh, that would be a no...so we will see if this will turn out or not.  Wonderful tools are available these days, and I may actually buy them and try them out someday.  Love your suds, those acrylic shapers look amazing!

Here is my inspiration photo for Denver.   I have a true love of the mountains here, and spend quite a bit of time traipsing through them on foot, so of course they needed to be in the backdrop, and I wanted a true representation of them, not just an artistic rendition.

In my opinion, there are three important elements to the Denver Skyline - the buildings, the mountains and the sky.  I added more sky to my soaps, as that is often my favorite portion of the view.  Here is my simplified rendition of this picture.

For the making of the scrapers, it was off to the 3D printer, and the myriad set of dilemmas to tackle there.  I found a basic scraper on thingiverse, and attempted to modify that build to my shapes.  When printing, I was having a difficult time with the flat shape adhering to the build platform - an issue I have had in the past. 

Thanks to google and the wonderful people in the Soap Challenge Facebook Group - especially Robin R Grieco - who shared some valuable articles on this topic, I was able to get it mostly figured out.  Printing a pattern on the bottom was time intensive, but key!  You can see from this picture that I still had a bit of that warping going on in that last print, but it worked well enough for the task.

Now onto the soap making! 

I needed to have some purple, and some orangey sky, so the first thing I did was infuse some oils with annatto and alkanet.  The remainder of the colors could be obtained using my regular, non infused recipe.  The blues are indigo, browns cocoa powder, reds moroccan red clay, green a combination of sea clay and chlorophyll, black charcoal.

I made each layer separately, poured into mold and scraped the shape when the batter was properly thickened.  Not too many pictures of this, as I was really concentrating on what I was doing.  So easy to forget you are, especially since some of my colors were fairly similar. 
There are a few process pictures though...

I was planning on doing an in the pot swirl for the sky, which in my experience would have given a better sky like swirl, but I forgot about that idea until I had already poured the blue in...ugh.  Well, just a poured swirly, swirl then...

I do need to say, that the scraper design does need some work.  The stabilizer bar broke on me, twice!  Easy to reprint, but still frustrating.  Not sure if this was because of the caustic nature of the soap batter, or just poor design.  And I also had one moment early on where the stabilizer bar came out of the holes and the scraper slipped into the layers below.  Didn't show in the cut bars, but its in there somewhere :)  So, I do feel there is room for improvement, which I will work on.

I wrapped it up and put it to bed for the night.  So unsure of what this would look like, and if this was even going to work.

Morning unmolding time!

Not too bad on the outside...

And, the revealing moment...

The sky is certainly not what I had originally envisioned, but the Denver Sky is oftentimes very interesting, especially with ongoing fires. 
Pretty amazing for soap anyway!!!  I'm very happy with these bars!!!