Archive for June, 2012

I’m a link jumper. When browsing the internet, I repeatedly find myself clicking links. It’s like Chinese whispers of web browsing. Goat’s Milk Soap ~> Owning a goat ~> Baby Goats ~> pictures of cute baby goats ~> How the migratory south-western red-knuckled ticks affect wild goats and what you can do to help. Erm.

By the end of it, I have no idea where I am and vague memories of how I got there. No less than 25 tabs are open and I have completely forgotten what I was searching for to begin with. People are more familiar with this happening on YouTube. You start off watching a funny complication of home video slips ups and before you know it you’re watching something on a pig giving birth to a human like baby in Mexico. “Er, I’m on the weird side of YouTube again aren’t I?”

The other night I was random link jumping and came across an etsy page of fascinating soaps with such amazing detail I was truly inspired. The page was Pure Heart Soap and you can see them on Etsy here: http://www.etsy.com/shop/PureHeartSoap

While not agreeing with their ‘affordable’ statement, $36 for four soaps is just way out of my purse’s reach, I do agree that their soaps are amazing for the amount of details and work that has gone into them. Hense, the price. An example, and the first one I found in their line,  was the Barnyard Cow:

I spent a good half hour admiring their work. The following day when I opened up my fragrance cupboard, I was instantly inspired to try something similar myself. Bonsai!! An awesome scent that practically threw itself at me from the cupboards, was my initial inspiration. “Create a soap that looks like a bonsai!” I thought to myself. I also thought how appropriate because if you shout ‘Bonsai’ with the right force and slight Asian accent, it’s like the soaping term for either:

• Charging into something…. “BONSAAAAAAIIIIII!!!!!”
• Jumping off something… “Boooooooooooooooooooooonsai”

That thought, that inspirational, “I’m going to make a kick ass detailed soap” thought, was as good as it got. Like the best slide in the park, everything went down hill so fast a small squeal sliped out. I squealed a few times actually. Grown up squeals. They begin with F and rhyme with truck. Once it even rhymed with TRUUUUuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!!!!

First, I planned it out. I googled for images of Bonsai trees, studied them, blocked out the internal voices laughing at me for even thinking of attempting something so complicated as a first attempt, and drew a mock up of what I would need to cut out to make it all so.

After that I poured small, thin squares of the different colours I would need – brown for the trunk, green for the trees, blue for the sky. Back to studying the images while those cooled and then I was off!

First thing I noticed – the mess!! I would mark out the area I wanted to cut with a pencil, then I would use my soap cleaning tool to make the cuts. This created SO much mess. Soap “scraps” doesn’t even cover this disaster.

Second thing I realised was that I had poured the soap squares too thick. While this would help to provide some depth to the picture, it also made it a lot harder to cut. Especially when I was wanting to do small branches and fine bends.

This was followed instantly by the third realisation. I suck at drawing tree’s.

I remelted and tried again… and again… aaaand again. Melt, pour, cut, curse. Melt, pour, cut, curse. Eventually I came up with something mildly tree like.

After the first hurdle was done, it was time to get the tree limbs set into more soap. Although by this stage I was thinking that perhaps this could just be a new invention of ‘puzzle’ soap and people receive each part individually. Surely that would catch on, right? No? Don’t think so…?

After pouring some clear soap in my mold, I popped in the pieces and just crossed my fingers they would stick. That wasn’t the end of the frustrations however…

I created two shades of blue for the sky to add realism. You know, just in case anyone mistook the bonsai tree for a fake as it looked so realistic. *chuckle, snort*. For some reason, the two shades of blue had problems with each other and the light blue completely dominated the darker blue. One the back it looked fine. On the front, nothing but light blue. Phooey.

The back:

Aaaaaand, the front:

All light blue. Bugger. This also shows the two bonsai tree’s that were the result of a weekend of frustration.

Just in case anyone isn’t familiar with a bonsai tree, here is what they are meant to look like:

The picture doesn’t show it, but bonsai tree’s are small trees. Teeny, tiny trees. Most of them under 30cm tall. The size of my soaps should have reflected that. Instead the largest one is near life size! The image of a petite little tree design on a soap was left squashed and trampled under the ‘made for a giant’ soaps crushing my dining room table. Ok, perhaps not that big, but still, big! Way bigger than they were meant to be.

I learned a lot of lessons over the weekend though. The most important is that everyone has their special abilities and making detailed soaps like the ones that inspired me, is just not my thing. I will likely try it again in the future so it helped to learn that even at 1cm, the soap was too thick to work with easily, and that simple shapes are better to work with.

I also learned that my “special” soap trick is a more impressionist style painting soap picture. First was Sea Breeze, then Twilight Woods and now … Tropical Coconut!

 It’s meant to look like sand, that green coloured water only ever seen on post cards of tropical beaches, blue sky, yellow sun and of course the palm tree. I’m pretty chuffed with how it turned out!

I followed this up with Caramel Apple Cider and a CP soap designed to look like an apple tree:

Not bad for a first time attempt with batter than moved quicker than I had anticipated. Quite pleased with it! Reminds me of a tree you would see in Alice of Wonderland for some reason…