Column Pour Soap Class

It's time again for another post about my soap making progress!  This month the soap class at Great Cakes Soapworks was a column pour.  I was so excited.  I had a new fragrance oil that I wanted to try, and even though the reviews said it might discolor, I figured I could just work around the discoloration by keeping some of the soap batter unscented.  I began my pour and suddenly the batter got super thick and clumpy, which is pretty much the worst thing ever for a column pour.  I got it into the mold, but it wasn't pretty.

It looked pretty good the first day... 

(and yes, I thought doing a 6 column pour was a good idea.  It wasn't.)

But once I cut it, it began to discolor and the not-as-obvious mistakes became glaringly obvious.  Clumpy pour means clumps of color in my soap!

So I tried again.  I tried a different fragrance oil.  I was sure I had done something wrong with the last batch, so I mixed it to a very light trace and began my pour.  Again, I got about halfway into it and the whole batch got very thick.  It caused the top of the soap to wrinkle!  Ack!  I finished, and while it looked better than my first try, it still wasn't what I was looking for.

I didn't even bother taking pictures of the soap in the mold on this one.  I knew that it wasn't going to be good.  You can see that pouring at a thinner trace made the soap pour smoother, but the lines are still too thick and overall it's not the delicate stripes I had hoped for.

I waited a few days before I tried again. Thankfully, in those few days, it occurred to me that it wasn't my technique.  It wasn't the FO's I was using either.  It was my RECIPE.  I was using too many hard oils.  I tried a super basic bastille (just olive and coconut oil) and I only mixed the soap batter to emulsion, since I was going to try to column pour with 12 colors.

And it worked like magic, just exactly the way it was supposed to.  It poured smoothly!  I had time to use all my colors.  The soap didn't wrinkle!  I had time to swirl through the top. Yippee!!!!

This time the soap swirled beautifully!  And it smells ah-MAH-zing!! 

I used Rise and Shine FO from Bramble Berry. It smells fun and fruity, a little like sweet tarts and is a perfect match for my tye-dye look soap.  My daughter is going crazy for it.

Finally!  Beautiful delicate lines!  Exactly what I had hoped to learn!

I'm glad I had a good reason to experiment with this technique because if I was just making soap to give to my friends and family I don't think I would have made enough batches to figure out what I was doing wrong. I think I would have given it up as a technique that was too hard and turned out too ugly. Now I am so excited to use this technique again and again!

xoxo