Dark Star: A Grateful Dead Soap

     If one were to press me on what my favorite animal would be my response would be different then the average millennial girl, I would tell you its a dancing bear. Even before I actively listened to the Grateful Dead I grew up with my dad and his vintage shirts with them on them from his concert days. The first bumper sticker I ever got was a dancing bear holding a rose, and at my low points I have shown disgust in those who talk about the cute little bear or calling it a "weed bear"(its happened more than once). So when I found a dancing bear ice cube tray on amazon you can be sure as hell i got it on prime. I didn't know what I was going to do with them but I went ahead and made one in every color of the rainbow with some melt and pour.

sorry for the bad Iphone quality

     After I made my army of bears, there's like 80+ of them, I painted their collars with mica. I use just dry mica and an old eyeshadow brush and it sticks the the MP just fine.

    

    My goal for this soap was a tie-dye pattern. The tie-dye plan was to do an in-the-pot-swirl and then once in the mold to make a circular pattern with a hanger swirl tool. The soap ended up being thinner than I thought (which yay! I now know Bramble Berry's lavender and cedar is a slow mover) and the in-the-pot swirl was on the verge of becoming a hot muddy mess so I just left it alone and hoped for the best. Since the top was looking a bit muddy I put the bears on so they were lying down and covering the entire top.

Another bad quality pic for y'all

     The soaping process went pretty quickly and smoothly for me and the six colors I used. I used Bramble Berry's Lavender and Cedar FO which is fresh and a nice all around uni-sex scent. When I cut into the bar it was a bit darker than I expected but I like it! For the name that was hard to decide, the last Grateful Dead soap I did was easy to name, a water type scent = Ripple. This one was harder to find something to fit the look and smell but in the end I think Dark Star fits nicely since its a darker tie-dye look. But I would be open to any suggestions that y'all think might fit this bar better!

     There was one final issue with cutting the soap, I had planned  out  how to cut it some what, but it was a pain getting whole bears in each bar. You can see the red/purple/blue bear bar is thinner than the others. In the end I gave up on having whole bears on each bar though I still ended up with less bars than usual.

Thanks for reading and happy Soaping!!
                                                  ~Anna Rose