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.