Since you have a crockpot, great, use it. You can even use it if you choose to try CP as well, because you can melt your hard oils in it, and turn it off and continue to do the soaping in the crock. If it has a removable crock, you can take it out and it will cool off faster. Or you can leave it inside the base, and wait for it to cool down a bit after it's off & adding all the soft oils. Then soap just the same as you normally would in a bowl with CP.
I don't use my crockpot for CP very often anymore, but I used to when I first switched from HP to CP, just as I described above. Mine is a very large capacity crockpot, and I decided to make smaller batches so switched to bowls. Besides the crockpot can really heat up my kitchen in the summer and I prefer to avoid too much additional heat added in the summertime.
Batch size for starting out, is something that I never considered until discovering that a huge batch of failed soap is a bigger problem than a small batch of failed soap. So starting with smaller batch sizes, of say around 500 grams or about a pound of soap, is good for learning the process and won't result in so much soap it overwhelms. That is about bars of regular sized soap.
You can use just about anything out of your recycling for molds, too (read about soap safe containers
here). But if you have an actual soap mold or a silicone baking mold, that works, too. Even a wooden card file box lined with freezer paper makes a decent soap mold. I picked up quite a few useful items at thrift stores to use as soap molds, too.
And always use a
lye calculator when trying out a new recipe, or when making any changes to a recipe you have already used.
Good luck and have fun!
