November Soap Challenge Club

I've been lurking the Soap Challenge Club site for years and never had the courage to enter the competition. Seeing all the entries from fellow soapers around the world was very daunting.

When Amy Warden announced the November Challenge I pushed myself to enter this time and I did, I had access to view the tutorials and the recipes and techniques I could use to make my soap design. Thought to myself what could go wrong it's just soap curls.....it looks easy and the design looks simple and I could make this in a week!

Boy! Was I wrong. Almost everything started to go wrong from the beginning, I didn't have a soap planner or a cheese slicer to begin with.

I set out to buy myself a soap planner, something that I've also been wanting to get. So excited I returned home with my soap planner and I set out to make my first batch of soap for my curls.

The recipe calls for high superfat and my loaf needed extra 2 days in the mould as it was weeping liquid. At this point there were Soap Challenge Club members who were already posting videos and photos of their work.

I ran into so much of problems, my planer wasn't planing the soap as it should be it was getting all mushy, and I tried making more loaves of soap to keep trying while I tweaked the recipe.

I reached out to the group and everyone was so helpful to provide tips, it could be the superfatting due to the current weather in the country and the planner itself could be the issue. Upon advise from the members I went on to purchase vegetable peelers and cheese slicers. That worked!

But the deadline was just 3 days away, could I make it? Now I have to make sure when I make the main soap nothing goes wrong but no it's not as simple as I thought it would be.

I had more issues with the batter it thickened up so fast and caused a lot of air bubbles in the soap and with such big gaps in between the curls it's nothing like I imagined.

So I set out to make another loaf of soap just hours before the deadline. Could I make it in time?

It's 1am here and 11am CST, deadline's at 2pm CST. I just checked on my new loaf of soap, nope it's not ready to be cut it needs a few more hours.

I have decided to submit what I have ready and picked out the best looking bars and uploaded them! The struggle was real and I had fun!!