A couple of days ago we created a layered soap exclusively for making different colored embeds. I made one of my standard soap recipes excluding any type of fragrance and after bringing the soap to a light trace, Eddie and I extracted portions of it to color. We had enough soap to make 4 different colors: blue, yellow, green, and red using our new oxides and ultramarine powders. Then we layered the colors into a small mold and put saran wrap between the layers. My thought was that we could just pull the soap out of the mold and then separate the layers easily. I was wrong.

The soap layers kind of molded into each other. So prying them apart easily wasn't an option. I had to work with it for about 30-45 minutes to scrape and cut the colors away from each other. So next time, I might just line different containers and mold all the colors separately. I wanted to make some additional colors anyway, but just didn't have enough batter.

Oh, what are embeds? Embeds are little chunks or shapes of already cured soap (you can also use little plastic or rubber toys) that you drop into a batch of soap batter at trace. The reason for the embeds being made before-hand is so they will be hard enough that they won't melt during the whole saponification and curing process. The embedded soaps look pretty neat with little contrasting blocks of color . I just thought I'd have some on hand in case I wanted to make a variety of soap looks.