Piping Soap Adventures

This month I've been gearing up for Easter - I'm so ready for Spring this year!!!

Amy Warden's Soap Challenge Club is doing a month on texturing the top of your soap, either purely with texture and botanicals (which I love the look of!) or with piping the top as you would with frosting.  The guest instructor this month is Whitney Schneider of Cheeky Goat Soapery, and here you can see the beautiful examples given for the tutorial.

Amy's Textured Top Soaps

Whitney's Piped Top Soap

It's been a while since I've piped some soap, and lots of ideas have been kicking around in my head, so piping it is for me!

I started off with making some flowers for the top.  I've found it's easier to have them made ahead of time so I'm not fighting so much with batter on the top of the loaf, just my preference, makes my day easier.  And, I also know whether or not I'm happy with what I've made before committing to the whole loaf :) 

So, I made some white flowers, added a bit of pink to the petals and black to the center.

I then moved onto the main loaf of soap.

It's mostly a natural colored batter, with a section of mini drop swirl about 1/3 of the way up the bar, created with colors also used on the top of the loaf.  So, natural, pink (rose clay), black (bamboo charcoal) and green (annatto/indigo).  For the green this time, I played with the annatto/indigo ratio, trying to achieve a lighter, more springy color.  It actually turned out a bit more blue than I wanted, but the effect is very nice in the final soap design.  I scented the bars with a combination of Calla Lily and Hydrangea, beautifully sweet!

Here is a link to the video of the pour on Instagram, if you like videos :)

I then placed the pre-made, piped flowers into the wet batter, taking into account where the bars would be cut to hopefully make each one with a decent bit of flower.

To finish it off, I piped fresh green leaves around the flowers to fill in most of the gaps and to further hold the flowers onto the top of the soap.

And here is the top of the loaf while wet.

And the cut bars...I do love how these turned out - and they smell divine!

Thank you for reading to the end :)
Come back again soon to read more soap making stories!

Taralyn