Video: Rainbow Soap with Petal Technique

Over the weekend, I was playing around with a cake design technique that I've been wanting to translate to soap. I do this a lot with techniques - baking and soaping go hand in hand!

One of my little darlings turns four this week, so I made her birthday cake based on a multitude of YouTube tutorials. (My kidlets love watching Nerdy Nummies and I totally don't mind!)

The inside of the cake is rainbow striped, while on the outside, I tried out the petal technique.

So, obviously, it was time to hit the soap studio to give my hand at this technique in soapmaking. Of course, I went to my standby: rainbow soap!

Surprisingly, it didn't take as long as it did to decorate the cake!

I don't have any slab molds right now (but that is changing!), so I used a Bramble Berry 10" silicone loaf mold and just filled it to about an inch tall.

You'll notice that I kept the bottles upside down inside some plastic containers. The raw soap is literally a heavy trace, so turning them back upright would result in a lot of banging the bottles around to get the soap to come out!

For this rainbow soap, I used the holy trinity soap formula since I had a masterbatch of it sitting around for colorant testing for the upcoming Swatch Mania v2. (50% Olive Oil, 25% Coconut Oil, 25% Palm Oil)

I also used micas and fragrance from Mad Oils, a new soap supply company started by three lovely ladies. The micas are: Bazooka Joe, Tangerine Dream, Bright Yellow Raincoat, The Maniacal Pea, Key West Blue, and Grape Nehi. The fragrance was their delicious Cotton Candy.

The Tangerine Dream mica morphed to a red orange while the soap was still raw, but changed back after saponification. I wasn't too surprised by this, as it happens sometimes with other orange micas I have.

The Bazooka Joe mica, which is pink, faded a lot but I think it's because I couldn't get the soap to gel. I'll probably up my usage rate next time to see what happens.

The fragrance smells delish, though! Out of bottle, it smells like the real deal. It mellowed a bit in soap, but seems to be perking back up as the soap gets older. Hurray!

Think you'll give this technique a shot? Make sure to tell me about it!