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…
Yes! It reminds me of Nemo. I love how bright you got your orange. It’s beautiful.
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Thank you! 🙂
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I just love these colors, so stunning! I would not have guessed they were natural colors, being so bold. Good luck, you’ve got my vote!
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🙂 Thanks so much! I was surprised they turned out so well too, once i scraped off the soda ash. At first it was a heart breaking dull color!
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Mine did that too, thank goodness for planers!
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You definitely have talent, Aruna! Your soap turned out fantastic, and I love that you showed your other attempts as well! I hope you can salvage your 5th batch somehow… I hope you’ll be back for more challenges!
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Thanks so much to you and Tatsiana for giving us this challenge. I found making this very meditative 🙂
I will definitely be back for more!
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Your colours really POP! Great energy 🙂
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Thank you 🙂
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Great job. Your colors are so vibrant for natural. I am making a note to try red French clay. Love your Nemo.
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Thank you!
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I like all your color combos. But your Nemo soap is fabulous. Great job! I’ll be looking to get some French red clay.
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Thank you! I loved this colour combo the best. I doubt i can part with these or even use them myself 🙂 they are so pretty
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These are absolutely stunning! Wow! You did a fabulous job. 🙂
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Thank you!! 🙂
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Beautiful! Turned out very lovely!
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Thank you 🙂
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Beautiful and fun, Aruna! I especially love how you used whatever you had on hand to make it. BTW, how did you get your white so white? I can never get kaolin that light.
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Thank you 🙂 I’ve been a recycler for years.
And I didn’t do anything special with the kaolin. Just mixed it with the batter before filling the bottles. My oils are all very light colored, didn’t use much Olive. Maybe that’s why?
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Aruna, I love the combination of colors! Gorgeous!! I’m happy you took the plunge and entered the challenge!!
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Thank you so much! I’m so happy I didn’t chicken out looking at all the other fabulous entries LOL
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i love how bright and beautiful the colors turned out
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Your soap does look like Nemo. Great job and beautiful soap.
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I love how your colors turned out! All of your practice soaps were pretty great, too. 🙂
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Thank you!
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You did fantastic! It is scary entering the challenge, especially the first time, but you did fine! The shape of your circles are really good! 🙂
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Thank you! I’m glad it did. This technique is mesmerising and I might make a few more colours for my soap range
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Congratulations Aruna beautiful Nemo Soap good job!
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Aruna,, I have not been making soap very long either. I started in November 2015, and this is my third challenge, it took a while for me to join the group and participate. Very supportive group, I have learned so much about soapmaking from the gracious teachers and Amy of course the group of people are wonderful too. I have been boycotting computers for a long time, so I also I had to learn about computers, still working on that one, not only do I have soap, but a blog too 🙂 Next month they are dividing us up in to new soapers and experienced soapers…. I hope to see you again next month.
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I hope to be there next month too! best of luck to all of us again 🙂 I started soaping in June and I have so much to learn. trying to grab every opportunity I get with the limited soap time that my day job allows me.
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Beautiful soap Aruna!! Love how you used what you have around your house too 🙂 It’s funny, when I was cleaning up after making my soap and squeezing out some dishsoap onto my sponge a lightbulb went off and I thought “wow this is a great squeeze bottle! haha. Congratulations, can’t wait to see all the soaps you’re going to make 🙂
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i have hoarded a lot of junk thinking I can reuse them sometime. I’m glad I got the chance to use these bottles that got accumulated at home. Now that I make all my soap (including dish soap bars) this set is probably the last that I will get 🙂
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