Taiwan Swirl Great Cakes Soap Challenge

Yeah, another challenge! Rather than the Taiwan Swirl, my soaper assistant daughter and I  affectionately refer to this soap as the "kitchen wrecker". It would have been much less messy had we processed this soap using the free-hand method demonstrated by Amy; however, I recently purchased dividers (no more cardboard!) so I had to use them! In the preceding post, I mentioned I had been doing some unsuccessful experimenting with new soap concepts and I happened to be using Oatmeal, Milk, and Honey FO from WSP. I had it in my head to do a unisex brown, black, tan, honey color combination, but after two unsuccessful experiments, I'm now down to just .5 ounce of OMH. I wanted to use it again for my Taiwan Swirl; however, .5 ounce would not adequately scent my 38 ounce oil batch. Hmmm...what do do? I thought of adding cinnamon essential oil or clove for a nice twist, but risk accelerated trace with those two. Instead, I decided on augmenting the OMH with a Vetyver type fragrance from Brambleberry described as having lemon, rosemary top notes, floral, sandalwood, and patchouli middle notes with musk and vetyver base notes. I've used it before in lotion bars and the scent is very complex...difficult to distinguish any one scent and very masculine. I tested the OMH with Vetyver in a plastic bag on Q-tips and was pleasantly surprised. Very nice and definitely unisex.

I was going to use 4 colors left to right, white, brown, black and honey...the honey expertly blended by my daughter. I was happy with the recipe...Mama Bear just right for pouring and swirling. The messy part came when it was time to pull out the dividers, three of them plus the two side pieces. I was tempted to scrape the clinging excess back into the mold but that would mess up the 4 carefully delineated stripes of color. Just like Amy did in her video, we made several passes vertical and horizontal passes in the soap. Here's what it looked like in the mold after a good gel phase:

Being somewhat spatially challenged, it took a bit of pondering how to cut these and still get my standard size soap. To get the full effect of the swirl, you have to slice the soap sideways.
My resulting bars are a bit smaller than my standard, but still very nice. I love the scent! I'm going to call it "Intrigue" since there's absolutely no way to incorporate the diversity of scents in this soap into its name!

 Thanks Amy for putting on these challenges. I learn so much and have a blast checking out the results of so many talented soap makers all around the world.  Happy Soaping!