Week 7 of the weekly "Soap Challenge".

This week's soap challenge is to create a gradient colored soap. This technique is new to me and I am very excited to try my hand at it. The idea is to have your colors start out one color and gradually lighten or darken with each pour. Amy Warden from Great Cakes Soapworks shared a great video showing a good technique to accomplish this, starting with a darker color as the bottom pour and lighten the soap as you pour each layer.

I decided to use burgundy oxide for my base color and gradually lighten it for each additional pour. I fragranced this soap with  "Black Raspberry Vanilla". I love this fragrance and can't resist smelling it every time I go into the curing. I wanted to also try doing a color line between my color layer and my white top layer, for that I used cocoa powder, applied with a tea infuser strainer.

Basically the soaping process went very well, the recipe stayed fluid to get a good pour and the fragrance oil did not accelerate the trace. Did you notice that I said it "Basically" went well.......the first mishap was when I was dusting the cocoa powder on the last colored layer and was almost done when I lost my grip on the tea infuser strainer, and of course it had to plop right into the soap. Well I fixed that the best I could then sprinkled on more cocoa powder. OK, now onto cleaning the cocoa powder dust from the soap mold so there won't be any of the dust getting onto the sides of the white soap base for the top. With a damp paper towel I cleaned around all the edges and it was looking really good, then..... I dropped the paper towel right in the middle of the soap again, gurr. Fixed the soap again and sprinkled more cocoa powder onto the soap. Now for the white top color, that I spooned on gently so it would not mess up the cocoa powder line (after all I tried to mess it up twice and did not want any more mishaps). I am happy to say that went well, I had some pink left over and could not resist adding a swirl to the top (I really love swirls).

To me the burgundy color seemed too dark for the bottom layer and did not show much of a color difference in the next two pours, but then I could really notice the color differences in the remaining pours. I loved doing this technique and already have some other projects planned.

Here are some pictures of the process and the finished soap. Please go to this link: Great Cakes Soapworks. to see all the other beautiful soaps that everyone else has made. Next week's challenge: Salt Bars, please check back.

Mixing the color.

The final color being poured.

Starting to sprinkle on the cocoa powder line.




Left over soap color for the swirl.

The completed swirl...did I mention how much I love swirls?





Soap log out of the mold.



Soap log out of the mold....another view.



Cut bars, made soap balls with the ends for embeds.