Making War Pig

As promised, I added another soap to the Soap for Hope line. War Pig represents all servicemembers and their sacrifices to keep this country free. This was a no brainer for me as my husband and I are both veterans. It took me a while to come up with a design for this soap since not just any one will do. I wanted a red, white, and blue theme and soon realized how hard it was going to be since there are sooooo many patriotic soaps. I wanted mine to be special, plus I didn’t want to copy someone else's work. After much research (and frustration) I finally got the idea to do a design I hadn’t tried yet. The secret feather swirl. Here’s one from handmadeinflorida.blogspot.com

Beautiful right? Imagine it being red and white. That’s the idea I had. To have about 2/3 of the soap white with the red and white feather swirl and 1/3 blue with white star embeds inside and on top. I chose a pretty unisex scent as I want this to be for both men and women. It’s a dupe of Karma from Lush.

Everything started out fine. I had never soaped with this fragrance so I played it safe and didn’t bring the soap to trace, just to emulsification. Well, apparently I didn’t play it safe enough. It started to trace pretty fast without me even mixing it. I had barely started the feather swirl and knew immediately I needed a backup plan for the design. I had to glop the soap in for the swirl and had to move super fast to get the embeds into the blue. Get this, I didn’t even stick blend the blue. At all. It was that thick. So there are speckles of blue throughout since I never got the chance to incorporate it all. This is what I ended up with

   

This is NOT what my vision was. The blue is way lighter than I wanted because of not mixing and it was only supposed to be on one side. This is what I get for using my new mixing bowls with no measurements on them. I had too much blue and not enough white so I had to cover the whole top of the soap with blue. I made it work though. Here’s War Pig ready for duty in your shower

 

Needless to say, I'm disappointed. The next batch will definitely be my original design. Now that I know this fragrance speeds things up, I’ll change things up a bit. I didn't get the making of War Pig because nothing went right and my camera decided it was going to start the holiday weekend early and stopped working. It randomly stopped recording. I've always said there's a ghost in this house. Anyway, I did get to record a cutting video, check it out on my YouTube channel. Don't mind my fear of the wasp. That thing was HUGE.

Fifty percent all of proceeds from War Pig will go to the Wounded Warrior Project. Buy a soap, help a veteran.

Happy sudsing!