Yesterday I cut my oatmeal breakfast soap and made freezer paper liners for most of my cardboard soap molds. Today I weighed my castile soap, and I'm currently waiting for my lye water to cool down to make my first soap with lard in it. I have two fragrances measured out, and the colorants have been sitting since morning.
I'm considering making another variant of the lye-heavy castile, and/or filling jars with oil to let natural colorants steep.
Made the lard soap! And man, do FOs stick to EVERYTHING when you're working with them...
In addition to the lard and the FOs, the other new thing I'm trying with this batch is to encourage it to gel. I not only wrapped the molds in towels, but I had been heating the towels in the dryer, and I put a tray of dry rice in the microwave and heated that for a couple minutes, then put the warmed-up rice in the bottom of the oven to try to add more heat and mass. Oven is closed and I won't be opening it anytime soon to try to keep in as much heat as possible. I did full water (since I heard soaps are more likely to gel with full water), but I also have 65% hard oils (lard, and a bit of coconut). I used Spring Rain and Ocean Water FOs from WSP, and did some color mixing-and-matching using the coral and green oil micas and the ultramarine blue powder from WSP. Spring rain got a natural base with accents in the coral and ultramarine blue. The Ocean Water got a light base and a darker accent with ultramarine blue and green mica.
I'm not sure how much I like the FOs... Spring Rain seems a bit too floral for me OOB. And Ocean Water seems like something I might like, but that's one that leaked a bit in transport, so I've been smelling it a lot in the house and might have overdosed on it. Also, both are far too strong OOB for me to make a true call on preference. I need to see what they're like in the finished soap.