Hello everybody! I am new to soap making and last night I made my very first batch! I have a few questions about it and since this topic is about first soap I will post here.
I wanted my first soap to be very simple yet have some conditioning values, also I wanted a hard bar with good bubbles. So after some reading and researching I decided to use three oils - Coconut oil, Olive oil and castor oil. Here is my recipe that I ran through lye calculator.
Olive Oil - 21.164 ounces (600 grams)
Coconut Oil - 12.346 ounces (350 grams)
Castor oil - 1.764 ounces (50 grams)
Lye - 5.088 ounces (144.244)
Distilled water - 13.404 ounces (380 grams)
SF 5%
My coconut oil was initially liquid (we are experiencing very warm weather here in Australia and it is very warm at home) so I didn't have to melt it, I just measured and combined all my oils together and later heated it up a bit.
I put lye into oils when lye was about 45 C and oils were about 42 C.
I got to a trace pretty quickly (I was even a bit disappointed because the process of cooling lye took so long but the most exciting part of soap making only lasted for a few minutes

). The trace was a bit thicker than I was planning it to get before I pour soap in mold, and the soap thickened pretty fast!
I covered my molds with thick towel and left it like that overnight. I checked in the morning and the molds were quite warm. I assumed it was due to gelling phase. I eventually uncovered the molds and soap cooled down but the color of the soap looked a bit inconsistent. I was expecting white colour since I have learned that coconut oil makes white soap.
It has been almost 24 hrs since I molded my soap and it still looks inconsistent in color (at some point its it white and some point looks a bit translucent)
It feels hard, it doesn't leave fingerprints if I touch it but easily dents with a fingernail. So here is the questions - should I remove it from the molds and cut it before it gets too hard to cut? Will it stay this colour or will it eventually be more consistent?
Here is the photo of my first soap, after about 22 hrs after I poured in into the molds
It comes off the sides of the molds easily which tells me it is time to de-moldl and cut. Am I right?
Also, I must mention one thing! As you can see from my recipe it suggests to use 144.244 grams of NaOH. But my new digital scales that I bought specifically for soap making turned out not as good as I was expecting it to be and as was promised by seller (I bought in on eBay) and it only showed one decimal place, so I could only measure 144 grams sharp. So I used a bit less lye than in the recipe (ie .244 g less) but I didn't discount any oils assuming it will go towards SF. Was it the right thing to do?
Thank you in advance!
And may I mention that I find this forum very useful and informative, I have already found many answers to my questions here

PS Sorry for my English if you see some mistakes, it is my second language.