"Have I Lost My Marbles? No, I Fried Them!" Soap

This is a Fullamoon original I dreamt up in honor of Tamra of DelightfulU who nominated me for the Versatile Blogger Award. I figured I'd better come up with something original and fabulous to live up to this award.

Ladies and gentleman (that's you, Kevin, I think you're the only gentleman who follows me) I give you (drum roll)...Fried Marble Soap!

Okay now first let me explain I've never actually fried marbles myself, but I do recall hearing that jewelers make crackled marbles by frying them in a pan and then dumping them into freezing cold water, which crackles the marbles from the inside out. Here's a photo I found of the real McCoy:

From these beautiful fried marbles, you can make earrings, slides and bangles by bending wire cages around the marbles.  Now here is my melt and pour soapy interpretation:

And here they are embedded in a solid color bar:

Like gemstone soaps, these were quite time consuming but worth it. I documented each stage so I can post a tutorial. I am delighted to share this with you! 

For this project I used Bramble Berry's:

White Ginger Tea fragrance
Copper Sparkle Mica
Liquid Orange color
Clear soap base
Goats milk white soap base
12-bar soap mold from Bramble Berry
Melon baller
Spritzer with rubbing alcohol
Knife
Glass container to melt soap base in microwave

Here are blocks of opaque orange, copper sparkle mica and clear. 

To make the ribbons, slicc the copper and orange into thin strips.

Give each strip a twist and set aside. This will form the "glass" ribbon inside the marbles.

 Chop up the clear block this way and that. These small cubes will form the cracks inside the marbles that give them a crackle appearance. See where I'm going with this?

I like marbles with more than one color inside them so I also made orange ribbons to complement the copper. I could have used solid white or some other color as well.

I layered the embeds in the following order - clear chunks, mica ribbon, orange ribbon, then clear chunks again. This ensures that the ribbons will appear in the center of your marbles.  Spritz with alcohol and then pour melted clear with the fragrance in it to fill the rest of the mold.

Get your melon baller ready!

I used the larger side of the melon baller but smaller marbles would have been cool as well. I think the bigger they are the more dramatic they are. I was able to scoop out 5 marbles per square using the melon baller.  The soap was a little soft, so I could really dig deep and get a full sphere.

I plopped them into colored soap and as I use the bar the marbles will appear from within. Of course once I unmolded the soap I wondered why I didn't just use clear to fill the bar. Oh well. Next time.

So there you have it. Soap marbles. Pretty cool, eh? I think next time I will skip the crackle part, use two colors for the ribbons and sink them in clear soap base.

  Thank you for looking!