Friday, July 17, 2015

Oppositional!

To any of my fiber friends who still cruise by here wondering what has happened to me- yes, this is another soaping post.  However- don't despair- I have actually been doing a fair amount of fiber work the past month or so- I just haven't gotten around to posting it.  And, it will not be too long before all the soaping stuff will be migrated to another site.  Bear with me!

I entered another Soap Challenge Club in July.  This time we were to create a soap depicting opposites.  It could be color opposites, or opposite 'things' like night and day, or thick and thin.  I chose to work with color opposites- violet and yellow, to be specific.

And I'm posting this not because I believe my soaps are worthy of any kind of recognition, but more as part of my ongoing learning experience with soap making.  

I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do.  I knew I had to use a vertical divider, so that eliminated some design ideas I had.  I toyed around with using two vertical dividers, but ultimately decided to stick with one.  I've never used a vertical divider before, and I figured that getting three colors of soap in without some kind of mishap would be more of a challenge than I wanted to undertake.  I finally decided I wanted my two sections to be violet and yellow, with the added design element of a 'Holly swirl', or an in-the-pot drop swirl in each side.  I'd use white for the base color of the swirl, with the yellow and violet for the accent colors.

So, I got my mold ready with my home-made cardboard divider. . . 


I made my batter and divided out the colors, and added my scents- pomegranate fragrance oil in the violet, champagne fragrance oil in the yellow.  


I then poured two two complementary colors into the mold.


Once they were in, I removed the divider.  So far, so good!!

Then I worked on the in-th-pot swirl.  After mixing in titanium dioxide, I poured two spots of yellow, and two of violet.



I was happy, everything seemed to be staying fluid, and the colors dropped into the white soap.  I swirled the colors once with a skinny skewer.


Then I poured this into the violet and yellow soap, holding the cup high to help it break into the violet and yellow soap.  From what I could tell, it all seemed just fine.  I scraped the last of the soap onto the top, and decided to leave it as it was- a Jackson Pollack top!

I had high hopes when I cut the soap the next day.  Alas, it was not to be!!


These three bars had a nice swirl on the violent side, but the swirl barely broke the top on the yellow side.  The other bars had a tiny swirl close to the top on both sides.



I like the top, and the swirl on the violet side on these bars looks pretty much as I'd hoped it would.  Why the swirl didn't drop lower is a mystery, one that I will be trying to solve with future batches.

3 comments:

Cris said...

Love the purple/yellow opposing colors and your in-the-pot swirls. You got opposite swirls too - one heavy, one light!

Amy Warden said...

I love it!! The swirls are beautiful!! Truly a gorgeous soap with bright, bold, opposite colors. :)

Unknown said...

Your colors came out so bold and bright! Love them. The swirls are really pretty, too. I like how you gently swirled the colors in the bowl before pouring them into the mold. That is an idea we will definitely want to try sometime. Thank you for sharing it. Part of the fun of soapmaking is seeing what comes out when we cut it vs. what we picture while we're making it. Great job!