Saturday, October 19, 2013

Soap Challenge Club - Dandelion Tiger Swirl

This month's soap challenge offered by Amy Worden of Great CakesSoapworks is called the  "Dandelion Tiger Swirl".  This technique was introduced to soapers by Vinvela Ebony, if you want to see her beautiful soaps please visit her blog dandelion SeiFee.  She is so talented and I love looking at all of her creations.
This technique requires that you have a fluid soap batter that you will color and pour down a platform of some type that you  insert into your soap mold to create the swirl. On my first batch I used Black Raspberry Vanilla fragrance from Natures Garden. My colors for the swirl are black, red & white. On this soap I used a plastic cutting mat to pour the colors into the soap. As I was pouring the colors the soap batter started to thicken which made it harder to do the swirl. I more or less had to sort of glob it on towards the end.

On my second attempt I used a piece of plexiglass cut to fit my soap mold. I liked how easily the soap flowed down the plexiglass to create the swirl. The fragrance oil I used on this batch was Vetyver from Bramble Berry. This is the first time I have soaped using this fragrance and it behaved really well and did not thicken the soap, the colors flowed so much better. For the colors I used Green Oxide, Super Pearly White Mica both from Bramble Berry and Magic Yellow Mica and Cosmo Martini Mica both from The Conservatory.

I enjoyed this challenge and I will be planning some of my future soaps incorporating this technique. I want to thank Amy Worden for putting on each monthly soap challenge,  and especially all her hard work in making the video tutorials for each  challenge. I have learned so much by participating and I love every new technique that I have learned.
 
Here is my first attempt at the Dandelion Zebra Swirl.


 

You can see that my colors are getting thick on me.
They are barely running down the cutting mat.

 


All the soap is in the mold and I have added the 
left over colors on the top to swirl.
 

Swirled Top
 


 
 
Black Raspberry Vanilla
 
 
Here is my second attempt of the Dandelion Swirl
 



You can see here how easily the soaps
 pouring here compared to my first batch.



Here are the cut bars of soap.