I've been wanting to join Amy Warden's Soap Challenge Club for a few months. I would think about it and think about it, not being quite brave enough. Then the deadline would arrive without me entering! It's true I could join, do the project and not enter it- just following along for educational reasons. This month finally I joined. One because there was an early bird price of just $2.95 and two because it's actually a technique I have been meaning to do again.
I haven't felt very creative in the past couple of weeks and needed a kick starter. This is perfect! It's designed for soapers to learn a new technique, have fun and ogle other soapers awesome interpretations!
While it would be amazing to win (there's a $75 Bramble Berry gift cert for the winner) just trying to think outside the box and do something cool is pretty rewarding in itself. Plus you get to watch a fun tutorial video, and I love Amy's videos.
My last column pour was made before the start of this blog, I used Bramble Berry's Sweet Meyer Lemon, and three of their neons. It turned out cool and I love it, but I didn't do any additional swirling after pouring and the colors I picked ended up being a little too similar. I chose a hot pink, hot orange and bright yellow. I've gotten better at understanding colors so I wanted to try the red-orange-yellow thing again. Plus you know... RED, the nemesis, is just begging to be conquered haha. I took the pressure off myself to ace this batch by deciding to do two interpretations. So this one could be just practice. Unless it turned out amazing of course ;)
I ordered some fragrances from Bramble Berry during their 'Givember' sale and they were due to arrive the day I soaped this. But alas, the package went astray. Astray as in, FedEx said they delivered but no package. So my plan of using a soaping favorite, Energy fragrance, had to be reworked. I had a bottle of their Herbal Essence dupe so I went with that.
I decided to try to do a column pour only in the middle of the soap. I saw this picture on this blog a while back and it blew my mind. So creative and a great take on the column pour!
I used my smallest plastic box, filled with coins and taped shut. I positioned it in the middle of where all the 6 bars would meet. This way the design would touch a corner of each bar.
Once my mold was set up and my oils cooling I set about to create the colors. I say 'create' because I had specific colors in mind and I knew that no neon or mica alone (that I own) would do it. First off, red. Oh red, you so crazy... I tried Bramble Berry's coral mica and Nurture Soap's red vibrance mica. Here used at 1/4 tsp coral, 1/8 tsp red. Pretty good, but a little dark pink for what I wanted.
I ended up dumping the red/coral mix and starting over with coral and then titch by titch added the red vibrance mica. I wanted to brighten it some so I (titch by titch again) added some neon red from TKB Trading. I over saturated the mixture because I wanted to be able to slowly add it to the soap until I got the color I wanted. For the yellow I went with Bramble Berry's fizzy lemonade neon with a little teeny bit of red orange mica. Since I was mixing neons and micas I used oil as the mixing medium. For the orange I just used Nurture Soap's red orange mica, about 1/4 tsp. I was really happy with how these colors came out.
I used aloe vera gel juice as the lye water and added silk. Looks almost milky!
I brought everything just past emulsion at about 110°F. You can see here how thin it is by the soap on the stick blender.
I ended up not using the full beaker of any of the colorants! I just slowly added the mixed colors to each container (with 5oz soap each) until I got the color I wanted.
Let's look closer at that red! EEEEEEEE!!!! That is my squeal of excitement haha. Looking pretty rad there red!
annnndddd then this happened! So just as I was about to mix the fragrance in, I thought, hey Molly maybe you should see how this fragrance plays? So glad I did. Bramble Berry stated "may accelerate trace". May huh! Well it 100% DID for me. I decided to add it mostly to the white base (oh yeah I whitened the base with my premixed titanium dioxide mixture). It chunked up like mad in about 2 seconds. It got almost too thick to stick blend the chunks back in. Seeing this, I added the rest to the base, it would ruin the design to add it to the colored soap. Then I poured (glopped) it into the mold. ♫On top of mount chuuunk-yyy all covered in soooaaappp♫
I whacked the chunky white soap down and proceeded with the design part. I quickly realized I had set aside way too much colored soap as I started to cover the whole top! I just jiggled it every now and then to get the soap to completely cover the top. The fluid unscented soap worked like a dream.
I was concerned that removing the block would create a crater in the middle since the bottom soap was so thick and no doubt thickening further as I added the top. But nothing bad happened!! I lost a little soap, but I had overfilled my mold so not a loss. This is how I left the design the first time I did the column pour. This time I took a skewer to it. I dragged the skewer from the center of the design out. This creates the points. If you do the opposite, it creates additional 'lobes' like the four you see here. Either way is neat!
I love the way this looks! I can't wait to see what it looks like cut since I ended up with something different than I planned! I sprayed the top with 91% isopropyl alcohol about three times over the course of the next two hours. I left this on the counter, not insulated, over night.
Well, soda ash happened. I didn't superfat this recipe that much and it doesn't contain excessive palm oil AND I sprayed it a few times. I did not expect to see ash on this. I also did not expect to see such a beautiful *swoon* white bottom and straight line between layers!
I'm doing this post a little differently in that I won't be ending with the cut pictures. I'll be posting those at a later date in their own 'reveal' post that I will link to the challenge. Check out my Instagram for a sneak peak! Until then, I'll be back with a second take on the column pour. Just to see what else I can do with this idea!
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