camomile soap

I made a batch of soap this morning for shower favours for next weekend's baby shower. (If you'll be attending, you can act surprised when the time comes.) This is a hot process soap, cooked in the crockpot and blended with a stick blender. I won't include all of the steps here, but if someone asks me for them, they just might appear. It's tricky to take pictures as you go when you're making a batch by yourself, since a lot of steps need to be done in quick succession, but I managed to snap a few. Here they are, and the recipe is below.I didn't take any pictures of the assembly of ingredients, but here's the soap, cooking away in the crockpot. I know it's kind of blurred because of steam on the lid, but after the lye mixture is added to the oils, the whole globulous mess is opaque and looks like the whitish part in the middle. As it cooks, it turns to a kind of translucent gold, which you can see it's starting to do at the bottom edge. When it's all changed, it's ready to have essential oils and other goodies added, then put into molds.
For this batch, I added some dried camomile for looks. I don't usually add any colour, as I really like the natural colour of the soap.
After the soap is in the molds and cooling, as the crockpot is being filled with water for washing, you can tell how it's going to lather. Not bad at all, considering I didn't have any coconut oil in the recipe, which makes for a very nice lather. I substituted a combination of olive and palm oils.
Here's one giant bar (which will be sliced into many smaller bars) just after it was put into the mold, still that gold translucent colour. As it cools, it turns back to opaque, as seen below.
Here's a little bar of the finished and cooled soap! I added a 'Gingersnap' oil blend for fragrance, and it smells very mildly YUMMY!

Here's the recipe (which I made up because I didn't have all of the oils called for in the original recipe):

Hot Process Soap
30 oz palm oil
15 oz olive oil
16 oz safflower oil
3 oz sweet almond/jojoba oil (I had a little left of each, so I combined them for the 3 oz total)
24 oz water
9 oz lye

It took the soap one hour and fifteen minutes to cook - quite a bit longer than some other recipes we've tried (we being a friend and I - I now have all of the soap making stuff at my house, and this is the first batch I've ever made by myself, I think!) It's so nice to know exactly what's in the soap that you're using to wash with. And I can pronounce all of the ingredients, which is usually a good thing!