I've posted my entry on the entry thread but figured I want to post the rest of the photos here and rant about my experience.
I always had bad luck with very intricate swirls such as this and the clam shell swirl. I've tried the clam shell swirls before and it took me three batches to get one remotely good looking one so I was kinda wary about it but wanted to challenge myself. My design was a oceanic/galaxy-esque looking bar.
The recipe I used was supposed to be pretty slow moving but I accidentally SB it a little too much. After adding the FO, dividing into cups, mixing in colorants, and pour into one pitcher, my batter is almost medium trace. To make it even worse, I grabbed the wrong mold-instead of the square shaped loaf mold I grabbed the tall loaf mold so I didn't have enough space to maneuver around. I got very discouraged and wanted to not submit the entry.
However, after slicing the loaf, I found the pattern to be not bad looking. Doesn't really look like a zig zag swirland the color got muddy at one end but overall acceptable. Here's the photos when it was just sliced.
Because I grabbed the wrong mold, all my calculations were thrown off as well. I ended up getting only 6 bars of my normal soap size, four slightly smaller end pieces and a huge chunk of unusable uneven piece (the one on the left in the left photo). I'd probably just use them as samples to give out.
The scent is China Rain from NG. It doesn't A or D or R as far as I can tell (my white parts look yellow-ish because of my oil) and a clean scent. I really like it but would probably try mixing it with a FO that's is more unisex.
The finished bars. I still need to plane them and trim the sides but overall I'm pretty satisfied with the results. Will definitely want to sue technique more often in the future.
