This months challenge from Amy Warden, of Great Cakes Soapworks is the Dandelion Zebra Swirl. (See this link for more info on the Soap Challenge Club:http://www.greatcakessoapworks.com/handmade-soap-blog/index.php/what-is-the-soap-challenge-club/). Amy does a great job organizing these challenges, providing a step by step tutorial plus a video and soapers from all over the globe join in. The soapers are allowed to enter one soap photo along with their blog and then the fun begins as we each get to pick our favorite three! I love looking at the entries. It amazes me how much artistic talent there is for creating soap.

The Dandelion Zebra Swirl is an original design from Vinvela Ebony from Dandelion SeiFee. What an inspiring, creative soapmaker! 
(http://seifee.blogspot.co.at/). 

Cathy McGinnis of Soaping 101 has a You Tube video on this particular design that I found to be helpful as well. 

This swirl needs no special equipment other than a thin divider. The base color is partially poured into the mold then the divider is set into the center of the mold. Using alternate colors each are poured carefully along the one side of the divider and then the divider is pulled out. The remaining base is added to the mold. Any leftover colors are used on the top of the mold to create an interesting swirl or pattern.

Below are my first attempts from earlier this summer. The first is "Just Peachy" with a subtle peach scented fragrance oil. The second soap is scented with a lavender and cedarwood essential oil combination. It is not strong, but very light.  had a contest for naming this soap. The winning name was Cedar Stripes.

Although both of these soaps turned out nicely I wanted to see if I could come up with something a little more exciting for the October challenge. For the challenge I would like to move the swirl up more into the center of the soap and get more of a sideways swirl rather than one straight across the soap.

My first attempt was a blend of orange, lemon and lime citrus essential oils with some new samples of neon pigments (Laser Lemon and Citrus Blast) plus a bit of chromium green oxide. I was glad I added some titanium dioxide to the base as it started darkening right away, most likely from the essential oils. I thought I had enough base in the bottom of the mold to move the pattern further up towards the center... hmm not enough!

My second blend was a combination of lemongrass, litsea and clary sage. with some lemon shandy beer. I added some pearl white mica to the base with pearl yellow mica, coral reef blue mica and bronze sparkle mica for the swirl.  The splash of color is less defined, more wispy. (it kind of reminds me of longhorn steers!) There is a bit of ash on the tops which I will take care of with a steam bath. Again, the design ended up too low for what I was trying to accomplish. And I completely missed the boat on getting it more sideways. 

Since I still had lots of time before the entries were due .... I gave it another whirl! 
I had two fragrance oils I wanted to try for making "man friendly" soaps. The first one was London for Men and the other was Twilight in the Woods. 

I went to work on a plan for these two fragrance oils using olive, palm, coconut, and rice bran oils with a little shea butter and castor oil in the recipe. For the Twilight fragrance I decided to go with a moss green, an ultramarine blue and some activated charcoal. And I got so busy that I forgot about taking photos till it was in the mold again! I should have got one while it was still wet - so, so pretty! 

I moved on to the London fragrance, it does smell very nice! For this I went with Brambleberry's Blue Mica 1982 (very pretty blue!) with their Aqua Pearl mica. I added in a bronze sparkle mica and a bit of pearl white mica for the main portion of the soap batter. This time I had the camera ready!

I am pleased with both of these two soaps. I didn't quite achieve my goal of getting that swirl up higher in the mold but the pattern is still very nice and the color combination for the man soaps turned out well.

Well this certainly turned out to be a really long soapy blog! And what will be my entry for the Dandelion Zebra Swirl challenge? I have chose Twilight! What would you have chosen?

We have a tie for naming this soap! Help break the tie by voting here!

This contest has now ended! 

And the winner is....... Cedar Stripes!!

The originator for this name is Angie Kremer! She will be receiving a bar of the Cedar Stripes soap for her contribution as the winning name! 

It appears that Facebook no longer gives me the option to put a poll on my page! But all is not lost as we will do it on the blog page instead!

This contest is to name the Dandelion Zebra Swirl Soap that is scented with lavender and cedarwood. The name that gets the most votes by Friday Oct 11 will be the name that it gets labeled as and the person who submitted the name will receive a complimentary bar of the soap!