Sporty Spice

Snowflakes are dancing

Outside, snowflakes are whirling and dancing.



Inside, soapaholic is sitting snugly on her sofa with a nice, warm, lovely, steaming cup of tea, felting soapsballs lest they feel cold without their little felt jackets.

Seifenblüten

The first soaps I felted without breaking a single needle. Yay!

Felted Soap

Another one of my felted soaps. Forgot to mention that I had initially tried wet felting and had only gotten... let's say okayish results (and by okayish, I mean lumpysoggydreadful). Then I found a really good tutorial on dry felting on El Sapone's blog. It has lots of helpful pictures in it, so if you would like to try dry felting but don't know how to start, have a look at her tutorial!

Fliederbällchen

My mum, who's working as a freelancer, sometimes takes me to this huge supermarket which is not open to the general public but to commercial customers only. When we went there last Christmas, I found an empty plastic tray on which the XL chocolate Santas had been displayed. The indentations for their oval bases should make wonderful soap moulds, I thought.

It was a rather sturdy plastic tray, but apparently it wasn't sturdy enough: when I poured the (cold processed) lilac soap into the moulds, they were completely warped by the heat, the tray nearly melted. Also, the wonderful lilac colour I had hoped for was completely gone when the soap had cooled down. Somehow the soap base must have swallowed the pigments...

When the soap had cooled down, I had to scrape it out of the warped moulds and turned it into little greyish soap balls. There is no foto of this soap au naturel because it looks really pathetic. However, its bland grey colour gave me the idea to try and felt soaps. You can hide even the worst soapmaking sins under a layer of dyed wool (I might consider felting some of the lapis lazuli soaps I showed you the other day). More fotos of my felted soaps are coming soon!