Mantra Swirl

Great Cakes Soapworks Challenge

Mantra Swirl

How time flies. Amy Warden of Great Cakes Soapworks has devised another inspiring challenge for us. This time: the mantra swirl, but not the simple top-of-the-soap mantra swirl. This is a whole soap body swirl, inside and out.

So, the first thing is to pick out a slow moving recipe. Check. Olive oil, coconut oil and a wee bit of cocoa butter. This moves slower than a slug on Valium. Should be perfect.

Next, I pick a non-accelarating, non-seizing, non-volcano-or-other-calamity-causing scent. Check.... I think. I'm using a mix of pine leaf, rosemary, lemon and litsea essential oils. This will be my first time using the pine leaf oil, but since the others are OK, I'm taking the chance.

The next step is to choose the colours. Since my fragrance is a woodsy-lemony scent, I decided on two shades of green with a white layer in between. But since my soaps have a strong tendency to gel and get crackly with titanium dioxide, I opted for silver mica as the "white" layer. This is also the first time I'm using this mica, so it will be interesting to see how this will turn out.

I mixed the batter without too much drama, and added the colours.

With my dividers in place, I poured my batter into the mold, making sure that I got each colour in the correct slot.

I took the dividers out and attacked the soap with my hanger sporting a very fashionable yellow plastic straw.

Finally, armed with the chopstick, I mantra swirled the top, praying that I didn't wreck the inside of the soap.

After a lot of impatient waiting, fingernail biting, jittery pacing, I took it out of the mold and cut it.

Right. So what are those pesky white spots in the chrome green and the white? They're just on the inside of the soap! My first thought was stearic acid spots, but there's no palm oil in this recipe. Huh! It looks like a winter storm, with the blue sky above, the white clouds and the green prairie getting snowed on!


Smallpox? Curse of King Tut? Aliens? Well, if nothing else, the soap smells really nice and the swirls are way cool! 

This is a technique that I really like. Lots of work, but worth the effort! 

If you have patience, here's the video!