January Soap Challenge Final

And so another soap challenge has come and gone and it was awesome! A really fun technique was shared this month, Circling Taiwan Swirl, and I was grateful for a really straight-forward technique. This challenge was the first attempt at using soap mold dividers, and I LOVED it! You really can create a ton of designs with just a bit of thought.

Since I didn’t have dividers prior to the challenge, my dad was on board to help create some. Unfortunately, the material we originally used was a bit too flimsy and really didn’t stand up well to flowing soap, but no worries, I just whipped out the cardboard to make some for this attempt. The cardboard dividers worked for what I needed, and the plus side is my dad has since made a friendship with the local glass cutting business and can get acrylic or other plastics to make as many dividers as I need now! 

With dividers out of the way, my next task was to determine the colorants that I wanted to use. The scent was easy as I had just received a batch of new scents and really wanted to work with White Sage & Sea Salt. Check! With colorants, it seemed to take forever because I just kept coming back to the same standard. My mom was working on a website design and was using the 2016 Pantone® colors of the year, Rose Quartz and Serenity, so I decided to take a peek at the 2016 choices for spring and came up with my three colors… Rose Quartz, Serenity, and Green Flash.

With just standard colorants, I was worried that I might not be able to pull off the Rose Quartz, but pink and orange can surprise you! I was happy that my colors were coming together. Now, the tricky part, pulling off the whole soap!

As you can see, I’m pretty happy with the results, overall. The lines that you see are me attempting to clean up the smear lines from the cut with a peeler since I don’t own a planer. My soaps have always been cut clean with my loaf cutter, but since this cut is different, can’t use it, so I unfortunately got lines =(

And full disclosure this is my third attempt… I forgot to cut my first two loaves the correct way, so at least they have clean cuts with the loaf cutter =)

Since the actual bar cut is a bit off, once these cure, I will be cutting them into small 2 ounces sizes and adding to sampler bag.

On to the next soapy challenge!

#SoapTeen