SOAPothecary’s Soap Challenge Club Submission - May 2021 (Column Pour)
“Peacock Tales”
Soap Design by Rachel Casamassa - Owner and Soap Artist At SOAPothecary
It’s May and that means it’s the Soap Challenge Club’s column pour challenge! It was my very first time participating in a challenge within the club and I was absolutely ecstatic about it.
The challenge seemed pretty straight forward. Pick a column(s), place it/them in a slab mold, pour all of your soap batter over the columns and then you had the option to finish off the design by manually swirling it with some sort of rod at the end. It looked much simpler than proved to be. After SEVEN attempts, I finally created a unique design that I was very happy with. If you’d like to know how I created this design, I will do my best to describe in detail how it was achieved.
Note: My apologies in advance for the lighting in our process photos. It is hard to get good lighting at night in my workspace and I’m actively thinking of ways to improve this. Also, due to complete focus during my final attempt, I recorded a video but did not photograph the process, so the photos used here of the process are from a soap that was almost perfect (before soda ash ruined it). That soap had the same design and I used the same colors.
If you want to see a YouTube tutorial of this design, you can view that here.
For my column, I was using a 20 oz coke bottle for most of my attempts. On my final attempt, at the last second right as I was just about to make the soap batter, I bravely decided to switch it up and use a beautiful scalloped vase that had been sitting on the counter staring at me for the last couple of weeks. I laughed and wondered why I hadn’t thought to use it sooner.
With 9 grooves, this vase proved to be a wonderful choice for a column that provided a beautiful and unique pattern in the soap. As each color was poured on top of one another, it dripped down the vase and hit the floor of the mold slightly shifting direction each pour. I anticipated the design would be cool, but I had no idea just how awesome it would turn out.
Upon weighing/melting the oils and creating the lye solution, the next step was dispersing the colors. Because this soap, which was made with mostly soft oils, was superfatted 3% and I did not wish to add anymore to the superfat, I dispersed the colors using the weighed and melted oils for my batter. Since I had 6 colors and my recipe called for 37 oz of oils (just over two pounds), I used 1/3 of a teaspoon for each color for a total of 2 teaspoons of mica and pigments. I dispersed the colors using the very talented Teri Endsley’s (Tree Marie Soapworks) palette/palette knife method. Since I have started dispersing my colors using her method, I’ve had great success with my colors being fully incorporated into the batter solving many issues I was having prior to.
For this design, I wanted to choose colors reminiscent of a peacock. The colors were as follows:
Mad Micas - Radioactive (Neon Pigment)
Mad Micas - Blue Shocker (Neon Pigment)
Mad Micas - Sexy Stranger On a Train Mica
Bramble Berry - Ultramarine Blue
Mad Micas - King Tut Mica
Bramble Berry - Apple Moss Green Mica
After dispersing the six colors in 1/2+ teaspoon of oil each (visually I added enough oil to saturate the pigment so it would fully disperse), I checked the temperature of the oils and lye solution. The oils clocked in around 95°F and the lye solution was at about 93°F.
I strained the lye solution pouring it right into the oils and lightly whisked them together. For my final attempt, I did not add any fragrance oil as I had run out of the only well-behaving fragrance oil I had. I grabbed my stick blender and just barely emulsified the batter making sure to keep it very fluid. After this, I weighed the entire pitcher and its contents, subtracted the pitcher’s weight, which I had calculated ahead of time, and then divided that number by six for the six different colors.
Once I poured the calculated batter amounts into each of the six funnel pitchers (about 9 oz each), I quickly grabbed the individual colors and scraped them into their respective pitchers, waiting to fully mix them until all six colors were in their pitchers. This is to attempt to control the trace of each color keeping them as close to the same consistency as possible. For this type of design, I look for the batter to stop moving as fluidly as, say, water. What I look for is when I drizzle the batter on the surface with a spatula, it shouldn’t move side to side very long. It should not build on top of the batter but it shouldn’t completely sink into the batter either. It should essentially stay on top of the batter almost melting back into it. This is the perfect consistency I have found for fluid designs.
Once the colors were mixed and the batter reached the consistency I was looking for, I then placed the pitchers in the exact color pattern order I wanted and got to pouring.
I just loved watching the cool pattern build layer by layer.
Pouring one color after the other until most of the batter was poured over the vase and into the mold, I saved a little bit of each color to manually pour into the center where the vase got pulled up and the colors got slightly muddied.
Muddied center before filling in with left over batter.
Center filled in with batter and ready to manually swirl with glass rod
Using a glass rod approximately 6mm in diameter, I made zigzags on all 4 sides of the mold. On the shortest sides, I took the glass rod and started from the corner pushing the rod all the way to the floor of the mold and dragging it diagonally down about 3 inches, then diagonally up towards the center of that same side of the mold, hitting the wall of the mold, then down diagonally about 3 inches and back up all the way to the other corner. On the longer sides, I did this same thing starting in the corner except I made more zigzags. The order on the longer sides was (starting from the corner) diagonally down, diagonally up, diagonally down, diagonally up, diagonally down and diagonally back up to the other corner. Once all the zigzags were made on all 4 sides of the mold, I started from one corner of the mold and did a wavy swirl through the center of the mold and diagonally up to the other side of the mold. I did this on the other side creating an “x” with the wavy swirl making sure to cross through the middle both times.
After the design was complete, I sprayed the entire surface with 99% isopropyl alcohol, covered the mold with a lid, very carefully wrapped Saran wrap around the mold making sure to not slosh the soap around inside, and placed it on a baking sheet in the oven set to 200°F. I immediately turned the oven off once the soap was in and the oven door was closed.
Such a cool, random and rugged pattern!
Soap before oven processing
Soap after oven processing and before unmolding, cutting, planing & beveling
The picture that inspired my color palette. Was I close enough?
Photo: Georgette Douwma/Getty Images
I went camping for the weekend so my final attempt soap stayed covered and sealed in the mold all weekend long. When I got home and saw the soap, cut it and took photographs of it, all I can say is this soap has made me the proudest of any I’ve ever made. It may not win the challenge, but it isn’t about winning for me. This challenge pushed me HARD and I’ve learned so incredibly much. I wasn’t sure about doing another challenge after I had so many flops attempting the column pour this month, but now I’m excited for more in the future!
The name “Peacock Tales” is not only because the design is reminiscent of peacock tail feathers, but also the story or tale behind the soap. It took many failures but the final result was completely worth all of the frustration.
I hope you love the soap and if you have any questions about how to attempt this design, please feel free to reach out and I will be happy to answer any questions! Until next time, take care!
Sincerely,
Rachel
