Bubble, Bubble, Toil & Trouble

Amy Warden's Soap Challenge Club is back after a brief hiatus, and that means another fun soaping adventure.  This month's tutorial is entitled Mini Drop Swirls, and I have tried to create this look before without success.  However, the lesson she provided helped me to understand the process better, and I really like the final product.

So, with Halloween approaching quickly, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to make a slimy, drippy soap to add to the fun we have with the celebration.  Amy showed the drips using various colors, but I really wanted to make a goopy looking soap and decided, for my first batch anyway, to go with a solid purple dripping into an orange background, something similar to the image below. 

I forgot to take pictures during the making of the soap, oops!  Therefore, you will get more words than pics, sorry about that!

The purple was achieved by infusing half of my oils with alkanet root and straining it out before making the final soap batter.  The orange was infused with annatto seeds and, again, strained out to make the rest of the batter.

I added the lye to each of the oil mixtures at the same time, one third purple oil base and two thirds orange oil base.  I stirred and stick blended the mixtures to an emulsion and then put the purple batter into a condiment dispenser.  With this first batch, I just used the tip on the containers, since they are fairly long, and thought I would see how that went before adding more length to it.

I poured the orange two thirds into the mold and got the purple ready.  The idea was to get the tip into the batter at the appropriate depth and then squeeze the purple out slowly as you move the dispenser from one end of the mold to the other, lengthwise.  It is somewhat tricky to get the tip of the dispenser into the base before the purple started to ooze out, but I did it without too much difficulty - once I decided to just do it. 

I did three or four lines, trying to put them at various levels in the orange batter.  When I was done with those lines, I started layering lines of purple on the top, covering up the orange that kept peeping through.  The end result was a solid purple top, which I wasn't sure if I wanted or not - it looked a bit plain.

Unmolded and cut the next morning, and I absolutely love the result, it is exactly what I was going for!  Sometimes I amaze myself :)

The second batch I made using this technique was inspired by the same thought, oozing slime.  These bars were made directly after the orange and purple bars, and I wasn't sure if my technique was good or not, since I couldn't cut them to see the result until the next day.  So, I decided a couple of things.  For one, I thought that the orange bars were too small - the batter did not fill up the mold so I was afraid that I did not have enough space at the bottom to really separate out the drops properly.  So, I added more oils to give it more depth.  And, I changed the colors to green (using chlorophyll at trace) and yellow (using annatto infused oils) drips, hoping to give the "slime" a more realistic look, with the yellow "highlights".  I made the background black this time, hoping the green and yellow would have a nice contrast with the darker color.

The results of this batch were pretty, but not at all what I was going for.  After cutting and looking at each batch, I like the size of the orange and purple bars better.  I may end up cutting these bars in half.  The yellow contrasts nicely, but the green did not get bright enough.  I do have to say that the top of these bars are perfect CSU Rams colors!!!

Now, in this second batch, I used a straw attachment added to the tip of the spout on the condiment dispenser.  The drops probably would not have made it deep enough without the additional length the straw provided. 

 These drops also ended up being quite a bit smaller than the first batch.  However, I think that it has more to do with the amount of pressure applied and the speed in which the line is drawn.

Here are pictures of the final bars from this second batch.