Mantra Swirl - Soap Challenge Club

I was so happy this month when Amy (Great Cakes Soapworks) posted her new soap challenge - the Mantra Swirl Soap Challenge!  I always wanted to learn the traditional mantra swirl and this was the perfect opportunity to learn it.  The other option was the modified mantra swirl, but I chose the traditional mantra swirl.  Plus, it's always fun when there are others trying it at the same time as me!

I decided to use my slow moving recipe, which has lots of olive oil and no castor oil or sodium lactate.  If I soap at around 88 - 90F then I can pretty much not worry about the soap recipe accelerating.  I chose to use Hippie Chick from Rustic Escentuals for my fragrance.  That behaved very well for me, thank goodness.  I chose yellow mica, white (titanium dioxide) and purple mica for my colors (inspired by Barbara's photo).

I didn't even have a log mold for this so I had to find a small cardboard box and line it with freezer paper.  Did I expect it to turn out?  I hoped it would, but thought it would take a few attempts.  Turns out I loved my first attempt. My cardboard box mold didn't survive however.   I had to tear the box apart to get my soap out and it wasn't even close to straight!!  I had to trim some soap off, but was thrilled because it revealed the beautiful swirls.

I had a lot of fun with this soap challenge and I'm very pleased with how these turned out.  Each bar is different and I just love looking at the swirls.  I will definitely try this again, but need to make myself a wide log mold first!  It also doesn't hurt to use more oils that you think in case you need to do some trimming.  You can save the soap for making soap balls for embeds in other soaps!  

Thanks Amy for the wonderful instructions!