Winter Mosaics

November 2020's Soap Challenge by Amy Warden is Mosaic Soap, taught by guest instructor Leila Hazou from the Mad Soaper.    I've created a few mosaics in our home, and have really enjoyed making them, so this is a soap that I've been wanting to try for a while.

These are the two soap batches that were made for instruction, the left demonstrating the beginner category, the advanced category on the right.

These are certainly some beautiful soaps to aspire to. 

For the advanced category, one of the requirements is that you need to have an inspiration photo that you are trying to replicate in soap mosaic form.  This is the category I will be entering, so below is the photo that I am trying to emulate.  I also need a minimum of eight bars, so I decided to add a couple more elements.  I added an out building with a path or creek meandering down, a snowman and a moose on a dog sled to a few of the fairly plain panes.

So, onto the actual making of the soap.

I started out by making a batch of soap with the various colors I thought I would need for the elements of the mosaic.  Grays, black, browns, green, a bit of red and blue, and a whole lot of white and very light blue for the snowy parts.  All of these colors are made with natural colorants - charcoal, indigo, rose clay, cocoa, chlorophyll etc.  I mixed the colors up a bit to hopefully give me some of the mottled colors I would need for the deciduous trees and the body of the moose.

I took my inspiration photo and simplified it down to a basic picture, that was more amenable to mosaic making, on a piece of paper.  I then used this as a template to place my pieces.   Now it was time to set about cutting these soaps into bits to create the soap design.  This took over a week - many, many hours of playing with soap :)

Blocks of soap

Cutting out a tree

Piecing it together

Putting the panes together

What a mess I made!!!

These pieces were laid out in proper placement prior to putting into my soap mold.  Then, they were transferred to the mold, "gluing" them along the way with melted cocoa butter.  Tricky this...getting the cocoa butter to be the right consistency, and then not having them move when pouring the "grout", as it did seem to move the pieces a bit.  Pouring slowly was key, but not too slowly?  I think the cocoa butter unglued as the batter sat in it, and I'm not really sure why as I was soaping at a fairly cool temperature.

All of the scene before in mold

The scene in the mold - also made some random mosaics with the larger leftovers

So, yes, then was the pouring of the "grout".  Since I had used so many different colors, I had a difficult time deciding which color to use for this.  I wanted something to contrast with all the various shades already used.  I decided to use some alkanet infused oils I had already made up, since I had not used any purple for the design as of yet.

I have not yet discussed what my plan was for the frame of the window.  I put place markers in to hold where I wanted my panes to be.  I was hoping to be able to pull them out before the batter was completely solidified, but that did not work.  So, I let them solidify and then poured the window pane around them.

The batter for the window panes was a mixture of colors - similar to what I have used for my woodgrain soaps.  For the most part this worked, although one of the panes turned out kind of light gray and therefore does not show up as well as the others.  Also, the woodgrain effect shows up much better on the sides than the top - see the photo near the end of this blog.  But, overall I'm happy with the results.

Quite an ugly mess at this point, and who knows how they will actually turn out.  So, this morning I was extremely anxious to cut into these!

Bottom of the soap with the Cocoa Butter and "grout"

Individual bars prior to planing

And, now for the big reveal!!!

Not too bad!  I do need to figure out a simpler pattern that I can make a bit quicker, but I'm really happy with these results!!!  You can kind of even see the moose on a dog sled if you know what you are looking for...lol!  If you want to see where I got this idea, you should check out Lola Bug Creations on Etsy.  A rabbit hole of mosaic beautifulness!

Here are the final pictures of both my mosaic scene, and the random mosaics made from the leftovers.

Random Mosaics with Leftovers

Side View to see the Woodgrain Effect

What an interesting technique, with so many possibilities!!!  This was certainly a fun and challenging challenge this month.  THANK YOU Leila and Amy for providing the platform and inspiration!  I always need a diversion from the norm of everyday, especially during this pandemic!!!