Monday, April 7, 2014

Okay, here goes...

K has really REALLY been wanting to do an intricate swirl design with multiple colors, and she wanted to use our new Honeysuckle fragrance oil from Nature's Garden.  So we pulled out all of our colors (from Bramble Berry) and got creative.  (Blue Solo Cup!  We'll fill you up.  Let's have a party! Just probably not the kind that Toby Keith had in mind...)

Titanium Dioxide

Patina Sheen Mica

Ultramarine Violet Oxide

Fizzy Lemonade

This soap recipe uses castor, coconut, olive, and palm oils.  

After mixing the oil mixture and the lye water,

and bringing the batter to trace,

we added Honeysuckle fragrance oil, then separated the batter for our different colors.

This technique involves multiple layers.  The first layer was white, then we alternated the three other colors in a serpentine fashion, then another layer of white, 

finally ending with the serpentine colors on top.

The final step is to gently swirl the colors using a bamboo skewer (or other small similar tool).

First we went up and down long ways, going perpendicular to the serpentine colors.

Once I pulled the bamboo skewer from left to right I decided to make the design a little more intricate (or as A says, K just can't leave it alone!)  Below you can see what happens when I pulled the skewer across the swirl I had just made.

This is the finished swirl, A physically took the skewer away from me as I kept messing with the design, a good thing she did as the design turned out quite well just as it was.

Here is what the finished product looked like when we removed it from the mold the next day.  It is cut and ready to cure for about 6 weeks.