Amy Warden's Soap Challenge 2013 - Tiger Stripes

Hey everyone - I have not been as active on the blog this past week or so.  It's getting to be spring here (finally!) and there is so much to do!  I'm working on some pretty exciting things that I should be able to share in the next month or so.

This post is my submission (even though I am blogging too late to be included in Great Cakes Soapworks' list for this week) for her Tiger Stripes challenge.  Many of you are familiar with the challenge, but for those of you who are not, Amy Warden has hosted Soap Challenges for the past two years for soapers to try out new techniques in soap designs and styles.  I didn't participate in this challenge last year, but I am very excited for this year.  She has 4 challenges:  Tiger Stripes, Elemental Swirl, Mica Swirl Tops, and Leopard Spots.

This is the first soap my husband and I worked on together, and it was pretty fun!

He even did the swirls on the tops for the left and center logs!

I decided to use purple, black and white for my tiger stripes in a Black Raspberry Vanilla scent, since I needed to make some more in that scent.  I am using Rich's 3-log set-up of my mold, and I needed my husband to help me out with the pouring.  The reason I used the 3-log set-up is that I wanted to try the tiger stripes at thin trace, medium trace and thick trace to see how this impacts the soap design.

At least that was my theory :)  I really struggled to get the soap even to medium trace for the last log, which was odd.  I guess I was so nervous about it thickening up too quickly that I was light-handed with the mixing.

Here is the first log we poured - it has weird soap flakes on the edges where it was cut.  This was actually the last log cut, and even though I wiped the wires off between cuttings, I may not have wiped well enough...

The second log did not turn out how I expected at all...  I think it's because we didn't do a great job of pouring directly on top of the soap batter line beneath, but it turned out some pretty awesome soaps:

I love the faces on these bars - there were probably 3 or 4 bars that had these faces.  The rest were some kind of impressionistic swirl :)

The third log was the most tiger stripe-like.  In between pouring each log, we stick-blended and whisked the batter to get it to thicken up a little more.  These looked the most clean, even though they weren't exactly what I was looking for:

Here are my favorite two of the bunch:

The faces on the second loaf just crack me up!

Hope you all have a great weekend!

~Chrissy