I had a comment on yesterday’s post about the Valentines soap from Kathleen B. that inspired me to make ONE MORE test batch of soap today. She wrote:

TOTALLY CAN’T WAIT until your first test batch of the Bleeding Heart (sweet pea & rhubarb) soap has cured…. I will buy it up! I loved how it turned out. Although I love how your second run turned out too, I am especially partial to the first batch. It reminds me more of the flower, because the ‘heart shape’ isn’t AS defined! LOVE LOVE LOVE.

Aha! I could actually try to make flowers instead of hearts! I found some images of sweet pea flowers for inspiration, then set out to create my interpretation through the medium of soap. Mission accomplished:

Sweet Pea Valentines Soap

Here’s an up-close photo of one of the flowers:

Sweet Pea Flower Detail

I had plenty of set-backs on this one. Too many irons in the fire, as my mom would say. I was trying to get the oils ready for two other full sized-batches at the same time I was making this one. Forgot to add the liquid oils after I had melted all the solid oils, so when I added the lye water, it was a curdled mess. Quick as a flash, I put the bowl on my scale and added the liquid oils, then re-mixed. The soap ended up thicker than I wanted it, but still managed to finish the project. I was hoping to have two shades of pink for the flowers, but I didn’t have time to mix another color. I had to add quite a bit of olive oil to the creamy-white colored soap to get it to behave, so it’s probably superfatted to about 15-20%. I’m just guessing…

The process reminded me a little bit of cake decorating, except that I had to work fast to get it done before the soap set up. There’s no time for do-overs! Nor is there time to make 25 at a time, which is my normal batch size. So I’m planning to cut this batch into six bars and sell them for Valentines Day if all goes well. They are scented with the Sweet Pea & Rhubarb fragrance that I used on the first test batch. Then I will make six more, and that’s it for this fragrance. I’ll make a full-sized batch of Strawberry scented soap with the hearts on it tomorrow.