With cherry blossom season coming up here in Tokyo/Yokohama, I decided my landscape soap challenge submission should include some cherry blossoms! Here is my inspiration photo:
I chose this particular photo because it looks like the trees are shedding their blossoms and the green leaves are starting to show. This is one of my favorite times to go see the cherry blossoms! It rains pink petals! And everything turns pink. It’s magical :).
I had no idea how I was going to make these cherry blossoms!! I actually have a small half-inch cookie cutter of a cherry blossom but thought it’d be fun to come up with another way to make them without embeds.
So here’s what I did!
PREP
Slow-moving recipe:
50% olive oil, apricot oil, avocado oil, shea butter, castor oil
Cherry blossom fragrance from WSP
Special tools:
Five squeeze bottles
Skewer (to swirl top)
STEPS
MP
1. Made tree trunk/branch embeds using MP soap & cocoa powder. Set aside.
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CP
1. Stick-blended melted oils until emulsified (not to trace!).
2. Divided soap into five squeeze bottles added a pre-made colorant (colorants mixed with a bit of oil) to each (cocoa powder, neon pink, rose clay, green pigment chromium oxide, TD).
3. Filled log mold half way full with neon pink, rose clay and TD using dots and lines.
4. Placed MP embeds in mold. These were long enough to be suspended in place by the pressure of ends of the acrylic mold. In other words, the soap was too soft to hold these in place. It definitely needed to be sort-of lodged in place :). The other option would be to wait until the CP thickened.
5. Filled the rest of the mold in the same manner while adding in the brown and green.
6. Swirl top with skewer.
And here we are!
This one has the sunlight coming from the back. You can see that the branches are actually lighter brown.
Thanks once again to Amy Warden for
hosting the challenges every month. And thanks to readers and soapers for inspiration!
merry day shop 