Craft Fail

By Heather Mann, Dollar Store Crafts and CraftFail.

CraftFails

I took up soapmaking thoughtfully, with a lot of in-depth reading on technique, ingredients, dos and don'ts, and every other piece of information I could get my hands on. Nobody ever taught me not to make soap that looked like food!

Chapter 1: The Spam Soap

One of my first cold process soap making sessions yielded this highly attractive soap that, once cut into bar form, just happened to look like a slice of Spam. Beautiful pink tint (marbled with white?) and with bits of parsley in it. When I found out what the soap looked like, I wrote this in my blog: "It makes me ill just looking at it. Much like a real piece of Spam would."

I saved the situation by slapping a funny Spam Can-esque label on it. The label said “Spam Soap: when you want to wash your hands with what appears to be potted meat.”

Chapter 2: The Cheddar Cheese Soap

With the unfortunate use of Red Palm oil in my soap-making ingredients, I yielded a large quantity of soap that looked like beautiful blocks of cheddar cheese. I ended up calling it "Que-soap" thanks to a suggestion from a friend. Why? "Queso" means cheese in Spanish!

Chapter 3: Mushroom Cloud Soap

I never did much Melt and Pour soap (which is exactly what it sounds like- melt it in the microwave, pour it into a mold, and you're done!). Perhaps one of my first forays into M&P discouraged me: a soap that looked like a mushroom cloud.

Clear green soap, poppy seeds, and a murky periwinkle. The messed-up effect of the two colors of soap co-mingling looked like a mushroom cloudafter the bomb was dropped. Those tiny little poppy seed people didn’t have a chance. Some of them even went up into the mushroom cloud. Those poor vaporized opiates.

Epilogue

These aren't all of my craft fails. Oh no. I experience fails frequently enough that I was inspired to start a community blog dedicated to sharing our collective crafty mishaps: CraftFail