Soap Challenge Club - Taiwan Swirl 1-16-14

Well here it is another month and a new year.  Things have settled down after the holidays and what a better way to start out 2014 than with another  new soap challenge offered by Amy Worden of Great Cakes Soapworks.  I thoroughly enjoyed this one which is called the "Taiwan Swirl". It is not a hard swirl to do if you have a soap that does not come to trace too fast, and the results are fabulous. The hardest part of this swirl for me was choosing what colors I would use, and what would be a safe fragrance that would behave in the soap long enough for me to complete the swirl. 
I made 2 different soaps using this technique, and also used 2 different fragrances. For the soap that I chose to enter into the challenge I used a fragrance from Natures Garden Candle & Soap Supplies  called "Honey Bunny". Here is their description of this fragrance: "This fragrance oil by Natures Garden opens with sparkling notes of bergamot, sweet orange, and crisp apple; followed by rich, golden honey nectar, toffee bits, and soft white musk mingling together to create a sweet treat as natural as sunshine."  The colors I decided on for this soap were: Fired Up Fuchsia, and Brown Oxide from Bramble Berry, and for the white I used Titanium Dioxide.

I decided to try an In-The-Pot swirl with the 2 pink colors and see how that would turn out. Lets see what happens.......

OK, now on to the pictures of my Soap Challenge entry:



Colors are ready to add to the mold.

Colored soap poured into the mold. The next step is
to remove the dividers so I can do the swirl. Notice the
In-The-Pot swirl with the 2 shades of pink.

Just finishing the first step of the swirl.
 

Here I have completed the Taiwan Swirl.
I really like the In-The-Pot swirl with the two pink colors.

 

Here is the soap unmolded and ready for cutting into bars.

 

Here's the first cut, and I have shaved a thin slice off of
the top to showcase the swirl.

 

The completed soaps cut.

Close up picture of the swirl.

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my second soap I used a fragrance from Aroma Haven called "Pomegranate & Ginger". In this soap I wanted to have a teal, a purple, a white, and a black. For the teal I used some liquid colors from Select Shades. With these colors they have a color chart to choose what color you want, then you mix other colors to obtain that color.  You can see in my pictures of the soap in the mold that the teal is more of a green color rather than a teal. My first reaction was that these colors don't really work, but as the soap cured it turned a lovely teal, just the color I was aiming for. I can't wait to make more soap using their colors. For the purple I used Nuture Soap Supplies Purple Rainbow Mica with a tad bit of Ultra Marine Blue Oxide added to get a darker purple, Activated Charcoal for black, and Titanium Dioxide for white.

 

Here are a few pictures of this soap.

 

Here are the colors and the swirl completed.