Well I ended up making a test batch of 100% EVOO in my newly lined mini-mold. If this works I'll have a mold that doesn't require relining with freezer paper, instead having permanent plastic lining that needs only rubbing off or water washing before reuse, maybe and a bit of mineral oil rubbing. I'm experimenting with permanently bonded liners and floating, removable liners, or a combination of both. The truth will come tomorrow when I unmold my 100% Castile and see if the mold is either reusable as is or maybe reusable after rubbing off or washing in water. If I can avoid freezer paper then the new lining system will be a success. I already have a different mold design using hinges that is awaiting the design decision that the new liner system is working. With Home Depot and a few lumber yards within easy driving I've got everything I need to make even better molds.
I repeated my avocado oil experiment (now #3) of a 50% avocado oil soap, again including 1 oz ppo avocado pulp, but this time without any FO to accelerate the reaction. My swirling efforts didn't appear as good as my previous avocado #2 with the FO problem that turned it brown, but if this batch goes brown then it's the avocado pulp, and might as well find out right now. If this goes well as far as appearance then I'll return to the lime mint scent.
So the 100% EVOO is looking good for the new mold, the 50% avo is looking good for not turning brown-black, and I'm working on a new "whiter" formulation for contrasting with swirl colors, mostly coconut plus other whiter oils. Those oxides I got from SoapSupplies.net are drawing me, the black and ultramarine and chromium green and the brown oxides are calling!
And I've got a bunch of FOs and a few EOs comin' from WSP. Scents are the hard core drugs of soapers, many losing all restraint when purchasing them online, but maybe I'm not quite that bad. You should see what I've got coming, enough that I hope to develop a staple of 5-8 of those good enough to use over and over and over. That WSP Dreamsicle FO was good enough to reorder!
I'm sure the WSP lemon lavender too. I already ordered 16 oz of it so much am I sure it will be a winner, enough for probably 16# of soap.
The final frontier: the artsyness of it. Good soap: It cleans you, it smells good, and it looks pretty. I'm having a lot of success with my various recipes, getting different qualities, different kinds of bars, but the scenting has been really challenging, enough but not too much, enough but not too little, the right scent vs. the wrong scent. I've given up that you just need to try a bunch of them from different sources and find out which ones smell good to you, then hope that you are a good judge of what your audience expects, or maybe even know what's better for them than they do, in which case you need to figure out how to inform them.
So that leaves me closing in on having a few good repeatable scents in my stable and being able to focus on the artiness aspect, something I can imagine has no limits, or at least only your imagination limits what novel appearances you come up with. I have some good ideas that are almost within the grasp of my present skills.