September 2018 Soap Challenge

Hello to all viewers!

I was so excited to hear Amy Warden, the owner of Great Cakes Soapworks, decided to revive the Soap Challenge Club!!! Thank you Amy for giving us this wonderful opportunity to practice and play soap with our peers and to… “Learn. Make. Share. Repeat.”

This month our challenge design was a mini drop swirl technique.  This technique gives your soap an amazing look of small teardrop shapes suspended within the body of the soap for a beautiful floating bubble effect.  For my first attempt at mastering this technique I used my standard soaping formula that is fairly slow to trace and scented  with lavender essential oil.   Lavender essential oil doesn’t seem to accelerate my soap base much so it was easy to experiment with for new designs.  I wanted to experiment with Halloween colors as well so this soap was made with mica from Nurture Soap in neon green, neon yellow and neon orange, glow in the dark pigment, in the titanium dioxide, and activated charcoal. I set the essential oil in Kaolin clay from Arizona Soap Supply to help hold the fragrance in the soap longer.  Unfortunately this batch didn’t make the cut for the challenge club entry as I over blended the batter and it didn’t get very good drops in the design as well as the heavy glycerin rivers throughout the loaf… so, more practice!  Sorry that a couple of the photos are blurry, I got oil on the camera lens but I do love the little face that was  in the finished bars, what do you think?

Colors prepped for mixing

Oil on the camera lens!

Squeeze in action – again oil on lens (sorry)

Top swirl

Love the face

Glow in the dark!

My second batch was made with the same oil recipe and a custom citrus essential oil blend.  I again used Nurture Soap’s neon colors but the orange wasn’t what I was looking for (it turned pink!) so this will be another soap for the house.   The “drops” are perfect in this batch though, but unfortunately this loaf was full of glycerin rivers.  I believe I have the technique down now,  and I hope number three will be perfect!

My third batch is a new essential oil blend I designed for the holidays with Sweet orange Chocolate and peppermint YUM!  I don’t know why I decided to try an untested scent on this batch but it worked out fine.  The colors are from Nurture Soap ( identified as “ns” below) and Crafter’s Choice purchased from Essential Depot (identified as “cc” below).  The colors used in this batch are: 24 K Gold mica (cc) and Yellow Gold (cc) combined, the red is Crimson Sparkle mica (cc).  The green is Alpine Green (ns), and I didn’t have a silver so I created some using titanium dioxide, Ivory Lace (cc), Super Sparkles (cc),  Platinum Grey (ns),  and activated charcoal.  I decided to pipe the top of this and used a mica drizzle of red, gold and green but the red didn’t stay blended very well.  I still love the look of this and the fragrance is soooo yummy!

Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of the creation of this soap (which is why I show the pictures from the above batches) but I do have pictures below of the loaf ready to cut and final pictures.  I really love this technique and will be using it again in the future.  I can’t wait to see all of the creative ideas everyone used with this challenge!