I feel bad for Composure. She’s always the butt end of my soap experiments. Composure is a single note tea tree oil soap, so I know I can rely on her to behave when I want to play with coloring techniques. A good number of friends and family use it as a facial soap, so I know I can always give it away or use it myself should the experiment turn out ugly.

Lately, Celine over at i am handmade  has been sharing all the gorgeous soaps she’s been making with the spoon swirl technique. Now the spoon swirl technique is not new to me, but it’s been many years since I did it. You have to have a very well behaved soap and fragrance formula, or it’ll set up too fast to work. Well, I caught the bug and felt the need to give the technique another whirl a couple weeks ago.

I was originally planning a video, but I didn’t have the extra hands. Instead, how about a photo or two?

To the left is composure’s first half inch or so in the mold. Soap is drizzled into the mold with a small spoon, which creates ribbons of each color throughout the soap. It takes about 15 minutes for a 3 lb batch, double the time for the double batch size. It takes quite a while to spoon soap into a mold, one spoonful at a time.

For you soapers out there, you mix to just barely trace to get the best consistency to work with and the line placement is haphazard when I do spoon swirls. Celine’s soaps look like she is more defined in placement.

To the right is what the soap looked like when I was done. (Notice how it was thickening up a bit!)

For soapers: If you’re interested in checking out other spoon swirls out there, including a few tips and tutorials, here’s some handy links for you:

Related posts:

Soap Challenges 2013: Elemental Swirl Soap, Week Two Soap Challenges 2013: Oil Mica Swirl Tops Soap, Week Three Soap Swap: The Final Bars of Cold Process Soap for the Color Swap (Part 2) Making Cold Process Soap: Elixir from Start to Finish