July 2016 Soap Challenge - Dazzling Sunrays Soap

It took long enough, but I finally signed up for the Great Cakes Soapworks monthly soap challenge! It's been an embarrassingly long time since my last blog post (smh), but don't worry, I've been making soap this whole time.

Anyway, this month's challenge was the pipe divider swirl. Since the PVC pipes are round, I thought I could take advantage of their shapes and make them look like suns.

I only ended up needing 5 PVC couplings, but bought way too many at the hardware store. For some reason I miscounted how many of the 2'' couplings I needed, so I had to use a 2.5'' one.

Here's a picture of the pipes in the mold - I used melted cocoa butter as suggested to get them to stick to the paper.

I had placed the pipes such that each bar would have a portion of "sun" after they are all cut. I had actually lined the mold and set up the pipes the night before I was planning to make the soap, just to make sure the cocoa butter had enough time to firm up.

For my colors, I decided to do yellow and orange inside the pipes and sky blue and a darker blue outside the pipes. I did all the math to figure out how much oil I needed, how much needed to be separated for the pipes, etc. Ok, I was good to go!

Planning everything doesn't always translate into successful execution, though. For some reason, after I do all my calculations, weighing, etc., I always seem to come up slightly short when I have to separate soap batter at trace. I made the mistake of separate the amounts for the pipes last, so I had a little less set aside for the orange than originally planned. Note to self - break out the smaller amounts of batter first!

I also used a fragrance oil that I had never used before, which was pretty risky. I used Sunny Herb Garden FO by Brambleberry. It supposedly behaves well, and I didn't experience much acceleration with it, fortunately. I should have, however, definitely used a slower tracing recipe. While my recipe had a good amount of liquid oils in it, it also had butters, which made things move quicker than I would've liked. Now I know, this technique needs a very thin trace and slow moving recipe, similar to the spin swirl. 

Now, I managed to get the soap into the mold and the PVC pipes out. I was definitely nervous about pulling out the couplings - the smaller ones are shorter, and so the soap level got very close to the tops. I thought for sure my fingers would mess up the design as I struggled to pull the pipes out. But, surprisingly, they came out very easily! 

However, I didn't quite get the effect I was looking for. Here's a picture with the pipes out, after I had started swirling: 

You can see that I didn't quite have enough batter to fill the pipes, and the yellow/orange parts didn't stay very circular after I pulled at the pipes. Next time, I would also try to get some more contrast between the lighter/darker blues. 

For my free-handed swirl, I did squiggly lines starting from the centers of the "suns" and going outwards. I was hoping to making it look like sun rays were coming out of the suns, but they turned out kind of funky, since the "suns" didn't stay circular.

Here's another picture after everything was swirled (please excuse the poor lighting).

Fortunately, I didn't get too much ash (since I sprayed the soap with rubbing alcohol and kept it covered), but I knew I'd have to plane off quite a bit off the top. Here's the soap unmolded before cutting.

And here's a picture of the bottom. (Again, excuse the poor lighting - this is why you don't take pictures of soap with your iPhone when it's dark.)

Surprisingly the pipe portions stayed pretty round at the bottoms! The bottoms of these soaps actually look really nice (normally I dislike the bottoms), I think they look more like suns. :)

Cutting and planing the soaps was a pain, but I was much happier with the results. Just for fun, here are some more pictures of the soap bottoms, in natural lighting.

Those are pretty enough without the fancy swirled tops!

And without further ado, here are some photos of the final soaps (taken with a real camera). I call this soap "Dazzling Sunrays Soap."

I definitely learned a lot through this technique and am excited to use my PVC couplings again. I was wary of how this soap would turn out but am pretty pleased with the results. :)