Rainbow Soap Balls

Making soap balls for the use of embedding in a log of soap is commonly done.  I've done single color soap balls, complicated layered balls, tiny and large.  This creation is talking about rainbow color soap balls and how I made them.

I started with making a batch of fresh soap mixed with each individual rainbow color.  I usually unmold the soap and wait for 2 days, that's when my soap is still soft enough to knead but not sticky anymore.  Then I kneaded each soap dough into thin long rods.

Combined the rods, cut into sections then twisted them into balls.  It is time consuming but look how pretty those balls are!  Usually if I want to embed big balls into a fresh batch of soap I need to do it within a week, otherwise the balls will get dried and become too hard to cut against soft fresh soap.  Here's the final soap I used these balls in:

Shooting Star

The actual time spent in making soap is pretty short, but that's not to say each batch doesn't take a long time to produce.  Why?!  Because I spend most of my time designing in my head.  This is a short story about the making of my Shooting Star soap. 

 It started with me thinking about my holiday season soap making.  I don't usually re-make soap from the past, if I can, I prefer reinventing the wheel.  Last year the same fragrance soap was made with rainbow colored soap bits embedded in t a white base.  The colors of rainbow always catch people's attention.  And the idea of rainbow led me to the image of shooting star.  The actually star is made ahead of time with transparent melt & pour soap base to embed into the soap log to look like a star on top of a ray of rainbow.

 Well, this is a perfect case of what I see in my head is totally not what happened in the reality...  See my diagram below:

Oh well, there's always the next time!