How It’s Made ~ FruitSoapia (redesigned)

When I first made FruitSoapia last year, it was pretty cool…looked like a bar of soap covered in Skittles.

Don’t get me wrong…it’s a super cute soap…BUT it’s a bit too wonky for me since I can’t seem to keep my lines straight. Worse yet, it’s crazy time consuming and creates a mountain of soap dishes. My nemesis….soap dishes. Especially cleaning out 7 squirt bottles filled with soap!

Now that’s all behind me….
I’ve been in love with Mica Oil swirls for quite some time now.

More recently, the Taiwan Swirl has peaked my interest…

So I thought…why not combine the mica oil swirl with a taiwan swirl using the seven colors of the rainbow???

Let’s talk about prep…
I prepared my oils and lye water. I immediately put them both in the freezer to lower their temps. I already know that this FO likes to accelerate on me so I wanted both my oils and lye water cool to give me time to work. They were both hovering around 65 degrees when I soaped them.
Next up was the ROYGBIV mica oil! Normally I’d prepare these in Dixie cups but I still can’t find anything after this move…instead, I stumbled across these little polka dotted cups. I added 1 tsp of mica to 1 TBSP of oil. (I used Rice Bran oil and micas from the Conservatorie) Mixed them well with pipettes and set them in the order that I wanted to add them. I find that having the mica oil similar to the consistency of fresh nail polish tends to work best for swirling.

A couple of notes:
My slab mold is a five pound acrylic mold from Soap Making Resource and I’m totally smitten with it!! it works even with my sticky, palm free recipe. I either wait two days to unmold or stick it in the freezer for a few hours to unmold it. I have not used sodium lactate yet but I hear that it works wonders!
My FO combo is:
Nature’s Garden Bumbleberry & Lick Me All Over with Brambleberry’s Pearberry, Yuzu and Red Apple. Yes…it’s a sweet symphony of yum!

Now that my soap oils and lye water have reached a low temp (65 degrees) I brought the batch to a light trace, colored it with Titanium Dioxide and hand whisked in the fragrance.

Using the pipettes for each color, I added a stripe of mica oil moving horizontally across the longest part of the mold. Due to the thin lines my colors worked out to be:
R O Y G B I V R O Y G B

Starting in the top left hand corner of the mold, I dragged a skewer down through the mica oil lines in a loose ‘S’ pattern. I tried making a tighter ‘S’ at the top but the colors started to muddy up on me so I made my ‘S’s’ a bit wider.

Looking at what I already made, I decided that a full Taiwan Swirl wouldn’t work. I had to keep the intersecting lines further apart or else I’d end up with a muddy mess. Starting in the opposite corner, drag your skewer in the opposite (perpendicular) direction in a loose ‘S’ shape.

Let’s see some more pics…what do ya say?

Aaaaand a HUGE deep breath as I insert the dividers…

This is what the soap looks like 2 hours later once the oil has absorbed into the soap.

It’ll be one to two days before I can unmold this batch. I’ll post the pics as soon as they’re ready!!