Tall and Skinny Shimmy Soap Challenge

Tall and Skinny Shimmy…sounds like the kind of girl I’d like to be! The Soap Challenge Club is fun for soooo many reasons! Hehehe!

I particularly loved this month’s club challenge technique because it yields such beautifully stunning results that look terribly difficult but actually require rather minimal effort. Of course, there’s always something tricky; I mean, it is a challenge after all. And this time, it was keeping a nice thin trace throughout pouring the soap. Wait, I think I’ve said that before…? Yes? That thin trace thing seems to come up quite often!

Nature’s Garden Bite Me fragrance oil was my choice for this soap. It smells just like Zebra Stripes gum! (Does anyone remember that stuff, or is it just me???) This fruity, fun and bright fragrance makes me smile when I smell it and laugh when I read it. And you truly do want to BITE the soap! Plus I know it keeps a nice fluid soap for a while because I used it to make this previous challenge soap. My color palette included bright blue, purple, pink and orange, all micas from Mad Oils. They just scream happy!

Since it’s the Tall and Skinny Shimmy, we needed a tall skinny mold. Rather than making one from foam board like shown in the tutorial, I opted for using a thin flexible cutting mat. I can reuse it again and again by taping up the edges.

For this fun little soap, I blended up a slow-moving recipe at about 85 degrees and pulsed my stick blender three times. That’s it! Just three little pulses and a bit of stirring, and that batter was so lovely. I was totally a rebellious student and did not weigh out all of my soaps into cups to get even pours….I eyeballed it. I was going for a gradient look, so I began with blue mica, tilted my mold on the pencil, and only poured about 3/4 of that cup of soap into the mold.

Then I added uncolored batter to that blue to make it lighter, tilted my mold the other way, and poured most of that soap in. I continued this routine of tilting and pouring most of the soap, then adding the next color with each of my micas from purple to pink to orange to get a little modified portion of the rainbow. I ended up with 8 different colors total.

The incredibly awesome part of this was that the soap stayed fluid for the ENTIRE process! Just at the end, you can see that the soap was getting into a slightly thicker trace.

Unmolding this baby was like unwrapping a Christmas present. First take off the tape, then peel the paper (or mold) away…

And TA-DA! A beautiful tall and skinny shimmy soap is revealed!

Now let’s cut it!

The only problem: air bubbles. The bane of my existence. Ugh. But still, I am so happy with these results!

Like always, I had so much fun in this challenge. I’ll definitely be using this technique in the future. I’m certain the other soapers in the challenge are going to produce awesome soaps! I can’t wait to see all of the lovely creations! Thank you again, Amy, for putting us all together! And thank you, Tatiana, for a great tutorial this month!