And we have soap!

Yay!

Lye came yesterday and we made soap last night!  Here comes the barrage of pics.

My ingredients, ready to go!

Measuring the distilled water

My husband being a smartass and taking a picture of me having measured out too much water >:(

At this point the good camera's battery died and we moved on to crappy cell phone pictures.

Measuring out the lye

Mixing the lye with the water under the vent hood fan

Measuring out the oils.  The coconut and palm oils were solid at room temperature, so we used a combination of microwaving and hot water bathing the bottles to get them splurtable.

The lye took quite a while to cool down.  We wound up putting it in an ice water bath, which worked well.  We kept the bowl of oils in a hot water bath to keep the temp up.  The lye was around 105 degrees F and the oils were about 100 degrees F when we combined them and started (blurrily) blending:

And we have trace!  This took about 3-4 minutes of continuous blending.  I made the mistake of keeping the blender base against the bottom of the bowl because I'd read about air bubbles, but once we figured out that that was incorrect and I started swirling it in the mixture more, it quickly came to trace.

Our finished soap!  The recipe said it made 4 pounds of soap, and this mold said it held 5 pounds, but as you can see it's full to the brim.  Can't wait to unmold and cut it and see how it looks!