Berries & Creme

It's been a while since I have written up a post about Amy Warden's Soap Challenge Club.  This month's challenge is a technique called Drop Swirls.  I love the way this style of soap can have a beautiful wispy and flowing feel.  Here are a couple pictures of the soaps that were made for this month's tutorial, to show what you can do with this technique.

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When I made these soaps, my mind was on Mother's Day and I decided to create a Berries & Creme soap.  The idea was to add a bit of coconut milk for the "Creme" and the fragrance is Berry & Mint.  I colored the soap with a combination of blue (indigo), purple (alkanet root) and red (rose clay).  I wanted a greater contrasting white along with these colors, and that is difficult to obtain using natural ingredients, as I do not use oxides, micas or dyes.  Therefore, I decided to use the saline lye technique once again (I used this method for the Cinnamon Buns last year and it worked quite well!) to get a brighter white.  I'm also SO loving salt in my bars these days :).

With the drop swirl technique, you place alternating colors of soap batter on top of each other in lines.  This is best achieved using squeeze bottles, but you can also use other pouring techniques which would vary the size of the drops and the width of the color in the final design.  I decided to use my squeeze bottles for this batch.  After making up the different colors and bringing them to emulsion, I divided them into their respective bottles.  I then poured the reserved bottom layer of naturally colored batter into the mold.

Then I proceeded to add the layers of color, all the way up to the top of the mold.  The drops variation also depends on the thickness of the batter, and the distance used when pouring the lines.  Once that was completed, I waited (while cleaning up the mess I'd just made...) for the reserved white batter to thicken up enough to look like creme when placed on the top.  I had some berry embeds that I made the day before at hand, and created some leaves using soap dough and a fondant mold.  These were placed on top of the "creme" at one inch intervals, to ensure that the embellishments would slide through the cutter properly.

Once that was completed, I waited (while cleaning up the mess I'd just made...) for the reserved white batter to thicken up enough to look like creme when placed on the top.  I had some berry embeds on hand, that I made the day before, and created some leaves using soap dough and a fondant mold.  These were placed on top of the "creme" at one inch intervals, to ensure that the embellishments would slide through the cutter properly.

After putting the loaf to "bed" my concerns were that the contrasts were not going to be very visible in the final bars.  The batter of the indigo and alkanet root soaps were so similar, and, not having done the saline soap very often, it's always a concern if it will pop the way I want.  However, after unmolding, it was clear that all the colors were showing up quite well, with wonderful contrast.

The cut is always the most fun, as well as most nerve wracking part of this whole process.  I was so anxious that it wouldn't come out the way envisioned, but I was not disappointed.  Look at that bright white!  These bars turned out to be stunningly beautiful, and the scent is lovely - something that customers will certainly love :)

These bars turned out to be stunningly beautiful, and the scent is lovely - something that customers will certainly love :)

Thanks for reading through to the end!!!