#Rorschachtestinsoap #butterflyswirl
We are cranking out the soap for the Butterfly Swirl Challenge (see Wednesday's and Thursday's posts for details). We will create as many different color/scent combinations as we can before we have to choose what we consider is our best effort. The part we love is that by doing a specific design over and over and over, we learn another "trick" of the soaping trade.
The following pictures are a brief glimpse of what happened during our third butterfly swirl try, spoiler alert.....it wasn't a happy ending!
The Green Tea and Willow FO we used is from +Rustic Escentuals.
We both love this scent and had used it to make Christmas present soap early last fall.
The scent is described as "having notes of leafy, green tea and wood with hints of fresh ozone air, melon, bergamot, coriander, night blooming jasmine, watercress, earthen moss, peppergrass, white willow, pink cyclamen, cedar amber, sacred datura, and white musk."
Seriously, how could we go wrong with something that smells like this!
Alison visualized a pretty willow tree hanging over a stream with light bouncing off the leaves, thus our colors were chosen.
From +Bramble Berry - Green Chrome Oxide, Fizzy Lemonade Mica, Titanium Dioxide and Patina Sheen Mica.
From +Rustic Escentuals Aborigine Amber and Icicle Mica
Here are the colors mixed up with oil.
As we had done on Wednesday with the Energy FO, we added today's Green Tea & Willow to the oil mixture prior to adding the lye/water. We soon had another first hand experience with the varying behaviors of different fragrance oils.
We added the lye/water mixture to the FO scented oils, but
we didn't stick blend very much as we wanted a loose, fluid batter.
As we were pouring the batter into the measuring cups, we realized that we had a problem.
Nothing crazy, but the batter was getting thick. Sometimes you can stir it and loosen it up a bit. Not today though - it was getting thicker by the second.
We quickly started mixing in colors, and when I say quickly, I mean we went into hyper fast mode. We actually made the green portion of the batter a bit darker than envisioned, but because we had to mix so quickly, we just dumped it all in and stirred. This is still a pretty color.
You can see the batter is getting stiff on the side of the bucket.
The Green will be the base color of the soap.
The batter should have been pouring into the mold like liquid, but it wasn't.
At this point it was plopping.
Big Frown
We tried pouring the rest of the colors in, but we ended up having to spoon it in because it had gotten so thick so quickly.
Once we had several layers of each color it was time (to try) to do the butterfly swirl with our hanger tool.
Butterfly swirl this thick batter? This seemed like a bad joke. The soap batter was so thick, I could barely pull the hanger tool through.
After one or two passes we gave up. It was obvious that we were having an acceleration crisis and this batch was not going to look like a butterfly.
Well, maybe one that hits a windshield, but that is all.
I scraped off the tool, and plopped the batter back into the log mold.
With no rhyme or reason I plopped the remaining soap batter on the top.
Then tried a little spoon swirl to try and make the top attractive.
Above is view of the soap after it had cured overnight.
We were disappointed that the batter accelerated so fast. During our post mortem discussion, we decided that since we had no problems with this FO for the Christmas soap, the problem today was probably a result of adding the FO to the oils before adding the lye/water.
Obviously it doesn't happen with all FO's because Energy worked like a charm when we used it two days ago.
After the soap had cured for about 24 hours, we were actually surprised to find that the soap, while not resembling anything close to a butterfly, did turn out nicely. The mirror images are still pretty cool, and the soap smells so nice.
We will call this batch our own personal Rorschach Test!
This soap will be cured and ready to go on February 20, 2015
No comments:
Post a Comment