Tutorial Tuesday - A change in events

Hi all! I sat down to my computer today to actually share with you my first attempt at Cold Process Oven Process soap! I was so excited because I managed to juggle taking pictures at the same time :D ...only to find out that I didn't have the memory card in the camera... the camera I have doesn't have any memory on its own so all those lovely and wonderful step-by-step pictures are actually non-existent! Oh the horror!
I did, however, manage to snap one picture of my soap while it is now sitting in its comfy oven blanket, so here's a sneak peak of my first ever made-from-scratch soap!


Let's see... I used this recipe:
8 oz. Coconut oil
6 oz. Olive oil
4 oz. Castor oil
2 oz. Sunflower oil

It's not going to be a very hard bar of soap, but I didn't have any of the harder butters on hand and went with what I had. According to SoapCalc, my soap should have:
Hardness (29-54): 38
Cleansing (12-22): 27
Conditioning (44-69): 57
Bubbly (14-46): 45
Creamy (16-48): 29
Iodine (not actual iodine, it stands for something in how the chemicals get bonded together) (41-70): 60
INS (136-165): 160

I must thank Emily Shieh today for helping me get the last minute questions and answers before I began!

So, unto story time. I cleaned my kitchen, yay! Then I prepared my lye/water mixture outside because my house doesn't ventilate very well. I like the lye that I used because it was in crystal form and didn't get all static on me. While I waited for my lye to cool down, I prepared my oils and got them heating up while I also prepared my fragrance and colors. I used .75 oz. of Brambleberry's Chocolate Espresso fragrance mixed with some Cappuccino Mica and actual Hershey's cocoa powder for one section of the soap and .5 oz. of Brambleberry's Almond fragrance with some titanium dioxide (white) for a different section of soap.I found out that I need to watch my oils a bit more closely >_< They got up to around 150 degrees F and I had to stir for a long time to get them cool enough to soap with. I'm really hoping that doesn't affect the final outcome of my soap *fingers crossed* No dreaded orange spots please! Please!

But once that was done, I added my lye to the oil and stirred it in with a spoon first then used my brand new hand blender to blend the concoction together. And wow! It was really cool to see the green-tinted oils turn off-white in a matter of seconds! Saponification is a cool process to watch :D I got a light trace in about 5 minutes so I separated the batch into two bowls and mixed one with the brown fragrance/colorant and the other one with the white fragrance/colorant. I tried to get a nice swirl in the soap, but that didn't want to happen (I made too much of the white for what I was going for). Anyway, now it is all sitting in my oven until tomorrow when I can take it out and cut it up! I'm praying it won't separate on me during the night, 'cause that would just suck! But being my first batch ever and I'm not technically following all the soap-making rules, I wouldn't be upset if it did happen. It's all a learning process, you know?

I am going to go enjoy the smell of chocolate wafting through my house now and I hope you got at least a little chuckle from my escapade ^_^ And for those of you in tornado alley, I hope you make it through the storm safe and sound!