Tuesday 11 June 2013

The Soap Challenge Club - The Peacock Swirl

If you looked around my house you'd probably pick up on something quite quickly. Peacocks, I like them. Really, I love them. I've pictures hanging in my soap room of them. Plates, cups and platters dot my shelves. The colours of their plumage make up my home's colour scheme. You could call it an obsession.

Fitting that the first challenge of the club would be the peacock swirl. Interestingly, I hadn't tried this technique before this past week. Why? I honestly don't know. In any case, I made my first attempt last night. One of the really nice aspects of this technique is that you can use nasty, accelerating scents without issue. The trick is that you only scent the base layer and you squeeze out your many layers of stripes on top of that. You only swirl the stripes. Since you don't add the scent to the colours used for your stripes, it stays fluid. And if you don't mix your batter past a water thin emulsification, it's be very fluid for a very long time.

My first batch for this technique was made with a simple blend of sweet pea and cherry blossom. I've dubbed it Sweet Blossom; yes, I know, my creativity runneth over. For the purpose of my swirl, I didn't make a fancy comb or anything, I just used my trusty chopstick. It worked so I'll probably stick with this for now. The only real goof in making this soap is that I dropped my divider into the freshly swirled soap so a bit of the swirl got smudged. Oh well. I'm really quite happy with the soap.

Here we are:


The soap, while unmolded, is still a bit soft for manhandling so "cut" pictures will wait for now.

Now, the soap I am entering in the Challenge is as of yet unnamed and very fresh in the mold. I just poured it in fact: I haven't even cleaned up yet. The scent is coconut lemongrass with a twist, the addition of a creamy vanilla and sweet lemon blossoms. This is the soap that almost wasn't. After I'd put down the first few layers of colour I realized that there was a layer of oil floating above the soap. My reaction was literally: "SHIT! It's ricing!" Thankfully I was able to dump it back into my mold and stink blend it back together. Only the scented layer riced so my individual colours were fine. As a side note, my base is coloured a rich royal blue. Once the base was back together everything went perfectly. To say I am happy with the end results is an understatement.

It will take me some seriously meditation and mediation with the various aspects of my nature to choose the name for this soap. It can't just be any name; it has to be THE name. ::) That said, here it is. My perfectly peacock soap.






The quill in the picture is one of my most loved possessions. I am so happy with the colours of the soap matching so perfectly with the quill!

So that's it. I am fully in love with this technique. I'm sure no one is surprised.


8 comments:

  1. I'm loving the colours. Great job. :)

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  2. The first batch was excellent as well, but you definitely nailed the colors on the second one!! I had no doubts you would love this technique! :) Magical.

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    1. Thank you Amy. I think this technique may have been invented for me :P

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  3. I really like the warm and earthy colors that you picked out, they look great with the peacock swirl design. =)

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    1. Thank you! It was fun to mix the different micas together to make the shades!

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  4. I love this. The fan is great and the colors are awesome! Love the feather touch to the photography also!

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    1. Thanks! That quill was my b-day gift last year. My sister knows me well!

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