Spinning Swirl Soap Challenge – Forest Bark Soap

Whew! I have been busy making soap again! Once I heard about the spinning soap swirl, I had to give it a try. It is such a cool way to swirl soap, and so uncomplicated. And it just happens to be this month’s Great Cakes Soapwork Challenge. I made three batches for this challenge~because there are so many variables to explore with this technique.

For my first batch, I used an essential oil blend, and several shades of pink/mauve. I colored it with Brazilian red clay, and I also added bentonite clay because clays are such good detoxifyers, and I just like the silky feel of soap with clay in it. I blended my mixture to thin trace, mixed the colors, and started pouring away. Here is the video showing the making of this soap:

and, a couple of pictures of the finished soap:

I liked this one, and the smell is fantastic, but I was really hoping for skinnier stripes. So then, I decided to go for batch number 2 🙂

My son had been asking me to make a soap for him. He wanted some “manly” essential oils like fir, pine, cypress, and cedar. As I was looking at various online examples of spinning swirl soap, it occurred to that the unique way the colors swirl together resembles the bark pattern on trees. Well, then I looked at a bunch of photos of tree bark, (I bet you can see where this is going) and then I decided to create Forest Bark soap. I chose a color palette using the shades that kept popping up in the bark photos, and then I made sure to barely mix the soap at all (just to emulsification), so my batter would be very thin and my stripes would end up super skinny. I really can’t believe how much like tree bark it turned out!! (Maybe I should have done this for the landscape challenge last month, LOL).

So, without further ado, here is the video showing how I made Forest Bark Soap:

And then, because I happened to fall in love with the spinning swirl, I had to make just one more batch. This one is scented with lavender and lemongrass essential oils. I am loving the way lemongrass smells lately! I wanted to do some bright colors with the skinny swirls, just to see how it would look. I also decided to pour in six spots, instead of just four. Here are a few photos of how it turned out:

and here is the video:

It was really hard to decide which soap to enter into the contest. I am pretty happy with all of them. I finally decided that the uniqueness of the Forest Bark makes it my overall favorite. I would say this is one of my all time favorite ways to swirl soap. The possibilities are endless!