A fair number of people have said their soap is too thin and/or that colors have mixed too much. Make certain your soap is at the trace I show in the Trace video before you load your container. It's also important to pour slowly into the mold and if you are pouring from a height, it can help to pour it down the wall of the mold as that will slow it down. The closer you can get the container to the surface, the less mixing you will have.
I hope that's helpful. I'm taking a guess at what might be issues for people so I apologize if I'm off the mark.
Oh, you are on the mark, at least in my case. It's a matter of impatience, really. I made this back in June and had the same problem with my first batch, too thin & the colors at the beginning of the pour blended. But by the end of the pour they were more distinct. (Same this time, the bottom of the soap mold shows blended colors, while the top shows some distinction.)
In June my next batch was too thick. I hope that doesn't happen with my second batch this time. I plan to make that today. I may even do a third batch today also.
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ETA: I Just did my second batch for the challenge, and ran into another problem. My colorants caused different tracing issues, which messed up the pour. I tried being prepared for the TD which I already knew speeds trace, but another color was even thicker than the TD colored one and that didn't work out so well.
I haven't been making soaps with more than one color for very long, and I am new to micas, oxides, and TD anyway, so I still have a learning curve going on, especially when it comes to multiple colors and these fancy pouring techniques. So I shouldn't be surprised this is a problem for me.
Anyway I poured 4 molds, and two won't even count because by the time I got to them I had blobs of very thick soap as well as some of the thinner soap batter, so they are not so much ribbon pour as random colors. I guess they'll look more like and ITP than anything else. But the first two started out fine. One of the individual molds is looking pretty good I think, considering the different rate of trace these colors gave me.
This morning I cut the batch I did yesterday and I think they look nice, but not where I was going with them. Today's batch may have one or even as many as 5 good bars. I'll just have to wait and see.
So my next batch, I won't use TD for white. I'll just use untinted batter for white. And I'll skip the other color that caused thick trace. Now that I know of at least 3 colors I have that won't affect trace, I'll just use them and plain batter and see if I can perfect this technique.
