Inspiration here.  I saw this paper on Paper Mojo and thought it would make a wonderful swirl in soap!  So here’s how I did it.

You’ll need a slow tracing/moving recipe.  Something high in olive oil, low in castor and low in hard oils/butters will work.

The Slow Moving Recipe:
Olive oil – 12 oz
Lard – 12 oz
Coconut oil – 8 oz
Rice bran oil – 4 oz

Water – 11 oz
Lye – 4.98

I used charcoal, spirulina powder, sandlewood powder and rose clay to color the soap.

Make your lye solution and melt the solid oils. Add the liquid oils to the melted oils and let everything cool down to about 115.  While things are cooling down you can measure out the natural colorants into each of their containers.  I added some water to hydrate the colors for easier dispersion and to hydrate the clay.

Make sure your molds and squeeze bottles are ready to go.  You don’t have to use squeeze bottles…I just thought it would be easier to line up the color pours in straight lines.

Bring your soap to a really thin trace. If you can recognize emulsion before you get to trace…that’s even better.

Divide the soap into the different containers. I believe I did about 3/4 cup for each color.

Pour all of the soap into squeeze bottles. Again…you don’t have to use squeeze bottles…I just thought it would make things easier.

Pour a layer of uncolored soap into your mold.

Rotating between all of the colors and white…layer the lines until you use all of your soap batter. You don’t have to pay attention that closely as you go along. But when you get to the surface of the soap make sure you have each color visible and that you try and have light colors touching dark so you have plenty of contrast.

Make sure the lines are going all in one direction.

Now its time to swirl! Using a small spatula or a craft stick we’re going to swirl through the lines.

Here’s a line drawn so you can see how I drug the utensil.

Now mirror that move. Start back up at the top.

Repeat that down the soap.

So that’s the peacock swirl! I haven’t had a chance to cut it yet but will post pics when I do. Next I want to try it with peacock colors and round out the humps a bit more like the paper. But this is the general idea.