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Room temp is fine.

I'd say most of us use silicone-lined wooden molds - the best of both worlds! The wood provides support for the silicone and some insulation to promote gel. The silicone makes unmolding ridiculously easy and leaves your loaf smooth like marble on five sides.

Looks like AliExpress has quite a few cello bag sellers, prices around $2 CAD for 100. I may grab some to try. Would punching a few holes in the bags help with sweating?

Do you have pics? Are you 100% certain you used NaOH and not KOH?

Quite a few WSP micas morph, though they do say so on the label. I have a lot of blue micas from them that morph into purples and greys. With Nurture, there is zero morphing - what you see is what you get. I'm quite enamored with their micas and I like that they show examples of them all in CP...

Judging by your recipe, you made a general-use bar soap, not a shaving soap. So I'd just use up the remaining bars as body/face soap. Definitely take a read through that long shaving soap thread, you can make a beautiful soft shaving puck with those recipes.

The word I was looking for was tulle! Like this stuff:

By sheer I meant like a fine mesh. I forget the name of the actual fabric. But it's very light and breathable!

Hey and welcome! The main issue with using lye-based soaps for hair is the high pH of 9-11ish. There's really no way to significantly lower that number, so it'll always be high. Skin pH bounces back quickly and it's alive and always shedding so soap doesn't do much damage to it. Hair, on the...

Welcome! You're in the right spot. There is a great wealth of excellent soapmaking info here provided by some amazing folks. :D

You'll want somewhere with good airflow and not in direct sunlight. Soap shouldn't be cured directly on anything metal, unless you know for certain it's stainless steel. If you're planning on wooden shelves, you may want to line them with parchment paper, dishclothes, cutting boards or plastic...

That's so great!! I had a friend make a wooden support for a silicone mold I got from Brambleberry and it's been great. Knowing someone with a bit of woodworking knowledge is awesome for us soapers! ;)

Is this the one, Dixie? https://www.walmart.com/ip/Spectrum-Organic-Shortening-24-Oz/26380937 I was thinking about grabbing some palm for veggie recipes and if I can get it local that's great.

Here's a nice chart for you to learn about what different oils will bring to your soap: http://www.lovinsoap.com/oils-chart/ There are plenty of great recipes floating around the forum if you'd like to try something tried-and-true first, just to start getting your feet wet and experiencing...

Killing chipmunks would be pretty much unheard of where I live in Northern Ontario! We love the lil' guys. We have a family who lives in our backyard. They like to tease our dog, she can never catch them. A lot of them around here are tame and will sit on your shoulder or eat peanuts from your...

KOH is for making liquid and cream soaps - no wonder your soap isn't hardening up. You'll want NaOH for bar soap.

Random Google searches seem to show that raccoon fat SAP falls between .135 - .140. So you could pick out an oil close to that in a soap calculator to determine the best amount of lye and water to use. I'd stick with a modest superfat, maybe 3%. And invest in a stickblender to save your arms! :)

Most lye calculators have a slightly different equation for calculating lye - they should all be fairly close though. I'd recommend running any recipe you find online through a lye calculator before making it. I trust lye calculators much more than a random blogger! The forum favourites are...

Basically, dry lye needs an equal amount of water to dissolve in. So if your recipe has 50g of lye, you need at least 50g of water to dissolve it. If you only use 40g of water, you'll have undissolved chunks of lye floating in your solution. An equal portion of lye and water is known as a "50%...

If my memory serves correctly, raw shea tends to have more unsaponifiables - so if you're planning to use a higher percentage of shea, it might be wise to go with refined.