Butterfly Swirl for Cold Process Soap

  Last post, I introduced you to my wonderful addiction of Soap Making and had talked about a technique called Combing. Well, I had so much fun participating in the soap challenge that I decided to do it again!

  This month's challenge, hosted by Great Cakes Soapworks, is the Butterfly Swirl. I have seen this technique pop up recently and have admired the beautiful artwork of other handmade soapers, while being a tad bit envious. So when I heard that was the swirl I would be learning, I was very eager to get started!

  It turns out that I had just received an order of new micas and fragrance oils and this was the perfect opportunity to use them. I think the most difficult part of this challenge was trying to decide which colors to use. After deciphering for a day or so (and posting a poll on Facebook), I settled on a combination. I decided to use my normal cold process recipe of olive oil, coconut oil, and avocado oil, as I know how that batter behaves so I knew I would have time to work with the colors. Here's what I choose.

(from right to left: Orange Crush Mica from Mad Oils, Super Pearly White Mica from Brambleberry, Peacock Mica, The Maniacle Pea Mica, and Tempest Mica all from Mad Oils)

  I chose to mix all of my colorants in a small amount of Olive Oil to make sure that they thoroughly mixed throughout the soap batter and I wouldn't have any chunks of color. 

  My next step was to ensure that my  lye solution and my melted oils were close to 90* and within 10* of each other.

(lye solution on the top and oils on the bottom)

  After I combined my lye and oils, I stick blended my batter until it was at a light trace. I chose to use Hedonic Tonic from Mad Oils as my fragrance for this soap and added it to the batter at this time. It is a very complex blend of florals and spices and conjures thoughts of running through a spring meadow in full bloom and the colors compliment this fragrance beautifully. I seperated my batter for coloring, pouring about 1/3 of the batter between four seperate cups, leaving 2/3 of it in the main pot. I then added my premixed colors into each cup. I used the Orange Crush as the base color and choose the remaining 4 colors for my butterfly.

 My entire batch is 2 pounds. These are regular size plastic drinking cups and they are only about 1/3 full of batter.  The bottom picture is the main "base" of the soap. I fully mixed all of the colors throughout the soap batter, submerging my stick blender in the little cups, that was a little tricky but it worked.

  Now the fun part! I grabbed my mold (2 pounder) that I had already lined with freezer paper. I poured a little less than half of the base in and then started with my colors. You want to start fairly high with your pours to get the soap to go almost all the way to the bottom but not quit. Then start bringing your pour down so you get a good mix throughout the soap. It doesn't matter too much which order you pour, just as long as you don't pour all of it at once! I started with Tempest and ended with The Maniacle Pea.  This is also where you get to be very creative. The more colors you pour, the more your butterfly wings will stand out but it is also important to mix some of the base color in for some contrast. So after pouring 2 colors, I would grab the orange base and pour a little.  I also tried to stay towards one side of the mold more than the other in an attempt to get the mirror image once the batch is cut. I think I may have had my soap batter a little thinner than I would like. I wanted definite seperation of the colors but a nice fluid soap that gave me plenty of time to work with it. What I ended up with was something in the middle. 

(The soap just after pouring all of the colors)

  Now for this challenge, you need a very specific, high tech tool.  It took me a little bit to find it and I was still unsure if it was the right tool.

Yup, it's a wire hanger, cut with nippers, then wrapped with tape. For this technique you need a hanger that is substantial and will move a lot of soap as you move throughout the soap with it. I thought I had it a little larger than I really would have like but it worked fine. I did end up making another one the next day with a piece of tubing instead of the tape. To make this swirl, you insert the hanger just at the top of the soap on the opposite side of the mold from your self. Gently drag the hanger towards you, then moving slowly down, make loopty loops, circling towards you, as you move to the bottom of the soap, then back up. You can vary the size of the loops but you don't want to over mix it. Once you reach the top of the soap again, and with the hanger still at the top of the soap, make a small pull towards you, then across, then to the middle, and pull straight up. It helped to practice the movement of the hanger with an empty mold. I sat in my living room one night, after watching the videos several times, just moving a hanger through an empty mold. I am pretty sure that my husband thought I had lost my mind! 

Since my batter was still really fluid, I gently poured the remaining base on top of the soap and then made lines with the remaining other colors, used a chopstick to make a quick taiwan swirl just on the top. I still had some of the oil mixed micas left in the cups so I decided to put drops on top of the soap and using the chopstick, run it through the drops, making them pretty. These colors really pop! 

After the fun is over, the hardest part of soap making begins! The waiting! I am a very patient person but I was so excited to see what I had done, it was agonizing.  Normally I am able to unmold my soap and cut within 24 hours but this one had to take extra long, of course. I was able to unmold the following day but it was still too soft to cut it without making a mess and after taking so much time to learn this swirl and plan it out, I wasn't going to mess it up.  It took 3 days of anxiously waiting and testing, and waiting... But it was totally worth it!

I enjoyed this so much that I made another batch with different colors. It turned out beautiful as well. Definitely a swirl technique worth keeping in my tool set. 

Combing Technique for Cold Process Soap

Creating handmade soap is both rewarding and challenging. It can be both simplistic yet luxurious, or a beautiful piece of useable art. As an avid soapmaker, part of the fun is learning new techniques designed to make beautiful pieces of art. This month, I participated in a soap challenge. The technique I had to learn was combing. You can make several different patterns with this style. It is so neat to watch the design come to life. This technique takes some skill to understand the chemistry of soap and the turning point of art vs simplistic. Here's how I accomplished it. 

Step one was to make a soap comb the width of my slab mold. This is what I dragged through the top of the soap to make the initial pattern. There are some on the market available for purchase but I chose to make my own out of cardboard and bamboo skewers.  I chose small skewers since I had planned to pour a solid base and only add my pattern to the top of the soap. Here is a picture of my soap comb.

After watching videos on this technique, I determined that I needed to concoct a recipe that would be nice and hard, and bubbly once cured yet give me enough time to work with the soap batter before it got to thick to make a nice swirl. I used my basic recipe of olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, and sodium lactate and made sure my recipe included full water and my temperatures were around 90* F. I also researched my fragrance oil to determine if it would accelerate the batter or cooperate and allow me to scent the whole batch and not just a bottom part. I decided to us Beach Breezes, after figuring out that it is a friendly fragrance, I added the measured amount to my cooled off oils. I poured in my lye solution and started to blend. Once blended to an emulsion (just enough that the oils no longer rise to the top), I separated out 4 squirt bottles with 8 oz of batter each. I added some Super Pearly White Mica to the remaining  batter and poured it in my slab mold. I then proceeded to add colors to the four squirt bottles. I added Black Oxide that had been mixed with some olive oil to one bottle, Aquamarine Blue, also mixed with olive oil, to one bottle, then Fizzy Lemonade was added to another bottle. The last one received Super Pearly White Mica. Once fully combined, I was ready to start laying my lines. I started at one end of my mold and squirted lines across the mold working my way to the bottom, alternating the colors, one layer at a time. Once I started to run low on batter, I made my lines more defined. Here is what the soap looks like after pouring all the lines.

Now it's time to comb the soap! Starting at one end of the soap, I inserted the comb making sure the comb remained vertical. I then dragged the comb through the soap to the other end and lifted it straight up to get a clean edge. 

That resulted in a beautiful soap and could be left as is, but I wanted more swirls! Using a single bamboo skewer, I made a curve shape, similar to an S, but overlapped the S's to make more of a figure eight, 8. What ended up coming through was a beautiful "paisley" type pattern.

Now, I am a very patient person but I admit it was hard to wait 24 hours to unmold and cut this one. So needless to say, after watching the clock closely, I carefully pulled this beauty out of the mold and measured my bar size. Cutting bar by bar, I pulled them away and was amazed at how wonderful these look. By far, this is one of my favorite batches of soap that I have ever made. Here is the final product. I love looking at these and am currently planning my next group of colors to try my hand at this technique again.