Decision time, we never figured it would be this hard!

#Butterflyswirl #makingatoughchoice #greatcakessoapchallenge

Friday, January 23, 2015

Today we were supposed to quickly pick a Butterfly Swirl entry for the Great Cakes Soap Challenge. Who knew it would be so hard!  We never got around to making any soap today because between cutting, steaming, and trying to match the perfect "butterfly" the day was gone.

The following pictures show you some of the journey we took today. It was fun but frustrating at the same time because we had hoped to have many, many more choices.  As it turned out maybe it was better this way because if we'd had many more choices we probably would have wound up splitting a bottle of wine while we whined!

So here is how we picked our entry....

To begin with we spread ALL 165 bars of soap out on the counter.

Wow, it didn't seem like this much when we had it stacked in the curing room.
This is a lot of soap!
If you could only smell them...

We signed up for the Challenge on January 7th and began making soap that day.  Unfortunately we discovered that only soaps made on or after the 12th (the official "start"day) are eligible!  So the first three batches shown above were out of the running. 

We started with Angel Wings, we liked this one.....

And this one, but eliminated it because there aren't enough swirls in the blue part.

We moved on to Litsea Cubeba EO mixed with Calabrian Bergamot and Violet FO, and found three combinations that classify as "maybies"

In the meantime we had looked at the Soap Challenge entries that were already posted and realized people were putting 4 bars together to achieve their butterflies.  This gave us more options, but didn't help much in the long run.

The soaps shown above are scented with Sweet Orange Chili Pepper FO, and as you can see putting 4 together didn't work out too well.

These are the 3 possibilities from this batch.

This batch is made with Lavender and Litsea Cubeba EO's, as you can see we were trying the 4 corner approach again, didn't work out.

This would have been great if there had been a center, we loved the "wings" in all four bars, but couldn't quite make it work.

We tried several senarios, no luck.

Same configuration as above only flipped over,  which didn't help.

Now on to another EO Litsea Cubeba and Peppermint (it's amazing!). We had several "maybe" combinations, but they looked more like a moth than a butterfly.

One configuration, 

Same one flipped over.

We came away from the Litsea Cubeba with three possibles.

This is another batch made with EO's - Lemongrass & Orange Valencia.

Unfortunately there weren't any combinations in this batch that made the final cut, a shame as it smells great and looks so nice.

We won't start with the Rorschach descriptions this time, just use your imagination!

The four pictures above are of the Rosemary Orange EO soap we made yesterday.

We tried to get a good butterfly, we really did, but all we came up with were some very strange looking owls.

Now we will get tough and start narrowing it down drastically (Alison has to leave in 1/2 hour)

Chopping block, stay go, which ones.....

And after all that it's down to three.

Then one.....

Here is our Butterfly!

Hope you see it, we do.