Springtime Poppies

For a little color fun this month, I decided to make some poppy soaps.  I have a few poppy inspired soap on my pinterest boards, and I've been meaning to attempt one for a few years now.  With encouragement from Amy Warden and her Soap Challenge Club, these soaps utilize a column pour technique in which you pour various colors of soap batter over a column of some sort to create waves of color.  Many artisans then swirl to make beautiful patterns in the soap.  TheVolcanic Rush soaps (click here) were also made using this technique.

Here are some example soaps - winners of another one of Amy's soap challenges highlighting this technique from December 2013.

Eucalyptus-Spearmint Column Pour by Tierra Verde Soaps

Rise & Shine Tie Dye Soap by Crochet Dynamite

White Trash Beautiful soap by Spicy Pinecone

As spring is unfolding here in Colorado, I'm looking forward to all of my flowers appearing in the garden, even though it just started snowing LOL!  I thought this technique would be perfect to make a few flowers in soap.  Poppies are one of my favorites, and the colors are those that I can make well using natural colorants.  Since I've done this technique before, I am taking this opportunity to experiment with a few of the parameters that were talked about in the Soap Challenge group.

I wanted to play with the type of column used.  Looking at videos of this technique, it appears as though the number of "petals" created is directly related to the number of sides of the column.  A round column would give a single circle going outwards, a square column would have four, etc.  So, I found a jar that has eight sides that I  thought would be fun to try.  Also, there are some videos of people using plastic drink bottoms to help facilitate even pouring.  Amy also used this technique in her tutorial.  So, I wanted to experiment with that as well.  I had several different bottom types, and figured I would try them each out.  I was making a 20 bar batch, so I had room to play a bit.  The difference between the bottoms was the depth and number of channels they had.

Since I have been playing around with soap dough the last month or so, with better success than in the past, I decided to use some soap dough as a few of the columns, five actually.  Then I used two of the eight sided jars, and four small, thin bottles I had kicking around.  I attached them to the base of the mold using a tad of my new homemade melt and pour, which performed much better than the cocoa butter I've used in the past.  Way more exciting for me than it should be, really!

Now to add the plastic drink bottle bottoms to the mix, I also used the melt and pour to attach those to the top of the existing columns.  This gave a kind of umbrella look to the columns, but worked pretty well.  I forgot to take a picture of the finished "set up", but you can see it in the video I made - yes!  My first video of pouring soap, with a big THANKS to my daughter El for that inspiration and a bit of tech support!

So, my idea for this soap was to have a blue (indigo) and white (kaolin clay) background with just a touch of green (annatto & indigo).  Then, I would pour the three different colors of orange (annatto seed) for the main portion of the flower and just a bit of black (charcoal).  The center would consist of a pink (rose clay) with purple confetti (alkanet root) for a bit of texture.  This is the picture I used for my inspiration.  I tried to make the purple wheel in the center out of the soap dough, using alkanet root and indigo for the coloring.  Not the best rendition, but it works for me :).  This soap was scented with Lilac & Sage, a lovely combination...thanks for the suggestion Janet!

Since I did a video for the pour, I didn't get any any still pics of this part of the process. 
But here it is...time lapsed, it goes quick.

If I were to make these again, I would not add the black or the pink, even though I do like the confetti portions that showed up really well in a few of the soaps.  I liked the blue and orange combination in the middle of the pour and that was what I had envisioned.  I did end up planing a lot of that off, as there was quite a bit of ash on top.

And, here they are all cut and planed.  They really turned out gorgeous.  I'm loving these beauties!!!