A couple of days ago, I decided to try an in-the-pot swirl in my log mold. I read a few tutorials first so I felt ready to give it a try. These things always look so easy on other blogs! I had some bubblegum fragrance oil that I’d purchased at Voyageur Soap and Candle Supply so I thought I’d try it. Unfortunately Voyageur doesn’t give much information about their fragrance oils, such as whether they accelerate trace (make your soap get thick too fast) or turn tan or brown in soap. There are some great sites that review fragrances for these properties, but I haven’t been able to find much info about Voyageur anywhere.

I knew there was going to be some colour morphing when I added the fragrance to the soap. It was a bit yellowing right at the start- not a great sign. Of course I was all ready to go with my colours mixed, so I went ahead and did the swirl. The design was quite good. I liked the thin lines of colour and the overall look. This is how it looked in the loaf and then right after cutting the next morning.

Not too bad, but certainly not white which is what I wanted for a bubblegum scented soap. I know you can’t tell, but I was going for white soap with pink and blue swirls!

I was lying in bed this morning very early and couldn’t sleep, so I started planning the rebatch for this soap. I visited one of my favourite soap blogs, called simply A Handmade Soap Blog. She wrote about a method of rebatching soap to add colours or fragrance and use it for embeds. Unfortunately she only blogged for less than a year and nothing has been added since Sept 2007. I hope she returns and blogs again. Her soaps are amazing!

I’d rebatched to make embeds before by melting the grated soap down in the microwave, adding scents and colour, letting it harden again and then grating it down again and forming it into balls. I used the melting-down method to make the balls for my Baby Powder soap. It worked pretty well, but the process took a long time and I found the re-grated soap very crumbly and difficult to work with and form into balls. It was a lot of work.

So this time I just grated the soap down, added a tiny bit of warm water and kneaded it like bread dough, adding some ultramarine blue for colour bit by bit till I reached the shade I was after. You can see by this picture how soft the soap is. I think this method is the best when the soap is quite fresh.

Then I used my cookie scoop to help form the dough into balls. I actually gave up on the scoop pretty quickly because I wanted different sized balls. It was like playing with sticky playdoh-  so quick and easy! I rolled about 1-1/2 pounds of balls in just a few minutes. Much easier than the previous method I’d tried.  I did get soap all over my camera taking this next picture. My hands were completely covered. Luckily soap cleans off really well

It worked so well that I went ahead and grated down the other half of the batch and used ultramarine purple for colour. (I didn’t get photos of the purple balls- oops!) Then I just made a fresh batch of unscented soap to embed them into. It’s a bit tricky knowing when to pour and how to to get the layers of balls in the mold at different heights. The mold is only half full here and I’m waiting impatiently to pour more base over it.

Here’s the mold completely filled and all ready to be put to bed. It needs to do its thing for about 24 hours to complete its transformation into soap,  so I’ll add photos of the cut soaps tomorrow. So far, so good!

Update Nov 1:  Here’s a photo of a few of the cut soaps. I’m quite happy with how they turned out. The little flecks inside the balls are tiny bits of soap from its previous life as a swirled soap.