@Misschief your Lily of the Valley FO sounds lovely!
I've mentioned before that my DH has both psoriasis and eczema. His skin does best with a lard-neem soap over all the others that I've made and he's tried. Sometimes I use only lard as the main base. Other times I'm using saved and cleaned cooking fats that are roughly a 50-50 mix of lard and tallow. I've tried adding some GMP in the past, but that doesn't seem to make as much difference for him like it does for me. Usually I add colloidal oats, but I forgot that last night. Here is the recipe I used last night:
35% lard
35% tallow
15% PKO
15% neem
2% SF and 40% lye concentration using MB lye solution with tussah silk, sodium citrate, and sorbitol. The loaves were quite firm this morning and ready to cut at just 12 hours after pouring.
I go back and forth between lining and not lining the molds. For liners, I've used parchment paper, freezer paper, dehydrator sheets, oven liner, and dollar-store cutting mats that were trimmed to size. My issue with lining is that I always end up with a seam, and some areas where the loaves are not perfectly round. I finally figured out that the inside of these pipes are not perfectly symmetrical, because that doesn't really matter for plumbing, I guess. But it messes with how well the liner works, if that makes sense. Last night, I used oven liner sheets, and you can see the seam mark on most of the bars (and some soap crumbs - these aren't cleaned up yet). But other than that, they turned out great - very smooth to the touch and very even in color,
Not lining the molds has the advantage of no seams, but it does make it trickier to remove. Recipes high in stearic-palmitic were much easier to remove than recipes with more OO or other soft oils. No matter what, if there is no liner, the only way to remove the loaves is to put them in the freezer for at least an hour, then let them sit on the counter for about 10 minutes. Then I either bang them on a hard surface to knock them out, or I push the tube down on a soup can to push it out the top. My main concern about that is eventually ruining the molds due to all the temperature changes and the physical knocking about.
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