Soap Challenge - July 2019



This month's challenge thought by Teri Endsley of Tree Marie Soapworks. The design is called pointy layers and this technique creates beautiful pointy lines in the soap.

Well, mine definitely didn't turn out beautiful, but to be honest it is better than I thought it would be right after I finished.

I used the recipe provided by Teri for the most part, I just substituted the cocoa butter with shea:

Olive Oil 35%
Coconut Oil 30%
Palm Oil 20%
Shea Butter 10%
Castor Oil 3%
Avocado 2%
Water
Lye
Fragrance oil

I used Mermaid Blue, Raspberry and Buttercup micas from BB and titanium dioxide for the lightest. I didn't use much of the latter, I wanted more of a beige color.
Fragrance oil is Raspberry Rhubarb, also from BB.
After melting the oils and mixing the lye with water I waited until both cooled down to 85 F. I separated the batch into four pitchers and added the micas and TD. I pre-mixed all with some oil to dissolve them before blending with the soap.


As soon as I added the fragrance oil I know I was in trouble. It started accelerating right away. Not terribly fast, but the batter wasn't as fluid as I needed it for the pointy layers. The bottle noted that it does not accelerate in cold process, but for some reason it did.
The first layer to be pointy was the yellow, at that time the batter was still moving pretty ok. I think next time I need to pour a bit slower to get more defined pointy layers.
I was struggling with the blue, but some of the bars got a few nice "pointies". By the time I got to the batter with the TD, it was a very thick mess. It was barely moving, I had to pretty much make it "flow" with my spatula. It was rather comical. Retrospect, I should've waited mixing the TD with the batter until the last minute so it wouldn't got so thick by the time I got around to pour. Live and learn! I enjoyed this technique a lot. I will definitely try this at some other time.







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