After spending, on average, up to 4 hours straight stirring soap batters, waiting for them to emulsify together enough to pour into a mould, I tweaked the recipe using different oils and voila!, I now have it down to 45 minutes total!!!! WAHOO!
Hubby walked in on me wiggling my way around the kitchen in soap maker joy, shook his head and walked out again. Some people just can't appreciate a good saponification when they see it...
So, armed with this new, improved recipe, I have been making more and more soap batches and playing with colours.
These are my Vanilla Rose soap balls, but instead of rolling them in rose petals, I swirled pink clay throughout the batter so you get patches of colour and plain white. I'm quite happy with these for my first try.
These ones are a new soap, but an old favourite fragrance - White Tea & Ginger. This time I used a yellow oxide (won't 'bleed') against the white - what I hope to happen, is that as the soap cures, it fades to a stronger white colour and the yellow areas will stand out more and more as times goes by.
On a completely random tangent, but still with the 'round' theme.. this is a dandelion (I think!) that's growing in our back garden. It just looked so perfect that I had to get a few piccies!
It's history is as a private residence for a Japanese businessman who created his own japanese style garden. Complete with fountains, a lake and stone sculptures throughout a garden just made for wandering around in. Well worth a drop in if you're in this neck of the woods. 
As I am writing this, we have a lovely gentleman installing a hand made Blackwood Timber screen door on our house. Now, seeing as it was something like minus 3 degrees this morning, I can't see it getting a whole lot of use until next summer! But this was the earliest that Michael had available to make and install for us. We didn't want to go the aluminium route, and were very pleased to stumble across Michael at the Deloraine Craft Fair last year.
