Hi, AlabamaBelle! I feel like Brad Paisley, writing a letter to me, back when I started soaping!
We had Norma Coney, we had Cavitch, we had a spring scale, we had spoons. We had...interesting times.
FIRST thing, please get a digital scale! They are around $20 or more, I've had 2 or 3 over the years and brand etc. is not super important. That spring scale gives you a different measurement every time you plop the same container on it, doesn't it? (ours did, so we used "2 out of 3" or "4 out of 6" as our accurate measurement). Because of how inaccurate our spring scale was, I am not sure if your first soap will truly be saved. It probably will be, and I hope so! But you could easily be making lye-heavy batches because your scale is inaccurate and your batches are very small.
Next: it's fine to soap while the oil temps are higher, higher temps get you to trace faster. Try 115 or 110. (And temps do not have to be very close at all). Your small batches will cool down quickly while you're stirring, so you could even hit your metal pot, carefully, with a little heat from the stove occasionally. (a laser thermometer from Harbor Freight could go on your xmas list for monitoring temps easily--but only after a digital scale and a stick blender!)
Stick blender yes yes yes! Oh, the times we stirred soap for more than an hour! The one time we gave up after 3 hours! Then we got some great advice, changed our recipe to add quick-trace stuff like butters and pomace olive oil, got a stick blender, soaped hotter, and whoosh! Rushing to line the mold!
Cavitch's recipes involve a LOT of different oils, some advice I got was to stick to just a few oils in a soap, those 10-oil recipes in Cavitch don't create a soap with all the goodness of all those oils. I do olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil, a butter at 2-5% for fast trace and hard bar, maybe castor oil at 2-5% for great bubbles, and if you really want something else, sure, maybe trade out the butter for it or plop it it with the rest.
Please let us know how the first batch is doing, and if anything weird ever happens while you're soaping, save every part of it and post here, we can usually tell you how to rebatch something so the ingredients aren't wasted.
