Dancing Funnel – Dancing Nemo

Being a very new soap-crafter, I thought I am being overly ambitious and over-confident trying to enter an international soap challenge. However, with support from friends, family and wonderful groups of soapers on Facebook who saw my trials, I was encouraged to just go ahead and submit my entry.

The technique called the Dancing Funnel required us to fill a slab mold with layers of soap circles in at least two colours. One outline colour and one solid colour filling the circle.

This requires us to hand blend the soap batter instead of using the usual stick blender to keep the batter fluid enough to work with. (I recently learned that my great-grandmother used to make homemade soap! While making this soap, I sort of imagined this is how she would have made it in those days before electric blenders.) I loved this method and am going to use it in the future as well. This really helps when we need slow-moving batter to make intricate soap designs.

When I chose these colours, all I thought was to use bright contrasting colours using all natural colorants. However, once this was completed, I realized that my design resembles Nemo!
This brought back awesome memories of the Scuba diving course that I took this summer. My first ever thrilling dive experience was at a dive-site called the Nemo Reef in the Andaman islands which was teeming with Clown fish.

 

So getting down to business…This was my third attempt and as we know, third time’s the charm 🙂

I used my slow-moving swirl recipe shown below:

20% Coconut Oil	Activated Charcoal
30% Palm Oil	French Red clay
20% Canola Oil	Kaolin Clay
4% Castor Oil	Cedarwood Essential Oil
6% Sweetalmond Oil	Ylang-Ylang Essential Oil
20% Sunflower Oil

The tools I used are almost all recycled stuff found at home. The mold is a small cardboard box, lined with a thick plastic sheet. This sheet is cut from the bags in which large online stores package their stuff. My squeeze bottles are empty dish wash liquid bottles. They work just as well as ketchup bottles but the plus was, I had loads of these lying at home!

Since I am entering the All-Natural category, I was particular that the final picture should be taken outdoors with the garden in the backdrop. The weather was perfect to give me a soft diffused natural light.

 

Here are pics of all my other trials…

1st attempt. Synthetic colours but very light and the batter thickened too much. Fragranced with Melon Berry FO

2nd attempt. Loved the colours of Act. charcoal and Kaolin with peppermint Essential oil. Again too thick!

4th attempt. The batter was too fluid so the shapes didn’t remain in nice circles. The soap turned out great though, scented with a mild Ocean Breeze fragrance.

5th attempt. I attempted the Indian Tri-colour and I meant for this one to be my entry. It also shows the army of recycled “squeeze bottles” that I used. But in my excitement at how wonderful it turned out, I unmolded the soap too early causing cracks all over the surface. Not sure I am going to save this one. Scented with Sun & Sand fragrance which reminds me of the beach and freedom!