May 2017 Soap Challenge - Soap Dough Butterflies!

It's been hard to find the time to participate in Amy Warden's Great Cakes Soapworks Soap Challenge Club, but I've really been wanting to learn how to make soap dough. Tatiana's dragon eye looks AMAZING and I've always been a fan of Sorcery Soap's creations. Thank you Amy and Tatiana for the wonderful tutorials!

I've worked with polymer clay many many years ago and decided to attempt the polymer clay cane technique for this challenge. Due to time constraints (and impatience), I used Bee's soap dough recipe (from Sorcery Soaps). I made a batch with 16 oz oil and divided the batch into four parts so that I could color them black, orange, yellow, and uncolored. I poured the soap batter straight into Ziploc bags so that I could error on the side of too much water rather than not enough. The dough ended up being a little sticky, but leaving it out for a little while helped(I didn't want to use cornstarch).

My goal for this challenge was to create monarch-like butterflies using the polymer cane technique with a simple green bar of soap as the base. Making the canes for the wings was VERY challenging, because soap dough isn't quite as elastic as clay. I started by blending the yellow and orange dough together, and then shaping them into parts that would make up the wing.

Added some black around the pieces...

It almost looks like unappetizing sushi, LOL! Please excuse the poor nighttime lighting. I made two of these with the intent of making the top wings different than the bottom wings. The challenge was squishing together what you see above and then working it into a foot-long cane. It probably took about an hour to compress the soap dough from a 3"x3"x1" piece to a 1"x1"x12" cane, it was craziness. Then came the slicing, lots and lots of thin slicing. My poor husband had to wait until 10pm to eat dinner that night lol.

Sorry I have no pictures of the canes, I was pretty frustrated by that point and didn't think to stop to take photos. I knew the design would not look consistent throughout the canes. But, after slicing the canes and putting the mirror images next to each other, I really loved how each pair of wings was unique.

Fortunately this batch made a lot of butterfly wings, so I don't have to worry about making them again anytime soon. :D I'm also very pleased with the vibrancy of the yellow and orange in the wings (I used Nurture Soap's yellow vibrance and orange vibrance micas). 

For the soap bar base, I tested out my Cafe de Savon square mold for the first time (there were lots of firsts for this batch). The mold worked wonderfully! I did an in-the-pot swirl with two shades of green and white, but the swirls weren't very obvious after cutting the bars horizontally. Oh well.

After I assembled the butterflies and stuck them onto the green base bars, I thought the bar still looked a bit plain. So I ended up embellishing the sides with little pieces of leftover soap dough. Overall, I wanted the final product to still be practical enough to use and maybe sell. Although, I'm wondering if I could actually sell these, because I'm worried about the little embellishments falling off from shipping or rough handling. Anyone have any thoughts on making sure delicate soap dough pieces stay put??

I made four bars in total, here are the results!!

If you look closely, you can see the differences in the butterflies!

Using soap dough definitely takes a lot of planning and preparation, but the possibilities are endless!