Making Taiwan Circling Swirl Soap

This was my first attempt at a Taiwan swirl and I have my husband to thank for it. After being my collaborator for the Soap Challenge Club, he got the soap bug and wanted to make more. He started watching soap making videos and found Tree Marie SoapWorks Taiwan Swirl one. He wanted to make it in the colors of a birds of paradise flower, which is his favorite flower.

I knew my standard recipe would not work for it, as it has a high percentage of solid fats that speed up trace. So I modified it to increase the amount the fluid oils (I did a mix of several I wanted to use up) just enough to avoid compromising the longevity of the bar too much.

Next was making the divider, a must for this technique. I watched Teri’s video too on the making of it, but since I did not have and did not want to purchase all the supplies just for this one soap, I thought I would try making one with the plastic cutting boards from Dollar Tree. I followed her tips for measuring, using a strip of paper, but instead of gluing the edge of the rectangles to the end piece, I folded and stapled it. This created gaps where soap likes to get it and remain stuck, so it is a messy result, however, it worked good enough for trying to make this one soap.

I usually use a 33% lye / 67% water combination, this time I increase the water amount, so it would be 31% lye/ 69% water to help with the fluidity, the trade back was increased soda ash, but since I would be planing the soaps, it was not an issue. (For more information on lye percentage or water discount, you may find this in depth article helpful.)

Here are the oils and supplies I used:

Birds of Paradise Soap

Recipe

Oil	%	Ounces	Grams
Olive Oil	32.86	11.5	326.04
Tallow Beef	25.71	9	255.1
Coconut Oil, 76 deg	21.43	7.5	212.63
Almond Oil, sweet	7.14	2.5	70.84
Castor Oil	6.86	2.4	68.07
Shea Butter	6	2.1	59.53
Total	100	35	992.21

Recipe Totals

Liquid Required	10.86 oz	307.96 g
NaOH Weight	4.88 oz	138.36 g
Oil Weight	35 oz	992.21 g
Fragrance Oil Weight	2.19 oz	62.01 g
Superfat		5%
Total Batch Weight	52.93 oz	1500.54 g
Lye Concentration		31%

Equipment

The mold was the 10″ silicone mold which is listed in the equipment link above.

I made the soap divider with plastic cutting boards from Dollar Tree.

The swirling tool was a wooden coffee stirrer like this.

Fragrance

2 oz of Energy from Crafter’s Choice

Colorants

The only color I know for sure the measurements used, was the orange. As we wrote that one up. For some reason I did not write the others, so the below is my best guess as to which micas we used.

• 1/2 teaspoon of Orange Vibrance Mica, 1/16 tsp orange oxide and 1/32 tsp of neon yellow pigment (at the time I had not purchased neon orange, but if you have it, adding 1/16 tsp of that to the orange mica will help).
• 1/2 tsp Hollywood Pink Mica
• 1/2 tsp Green Mojito Mica
• 1/2 tsp purple galaxy mica
• 1/2 tsp Klein Blue Mica

(Some of the above links are affiliate links)

Here are the videos of the making: