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Weigh all of your oils out and toss them into a crockpot or on the stove, in a steel pan, on very low heat. Wait until everything melts. With your safety equipment (gloves, and eye protection), add your lye to your water stirring gently and slowly. Pour your lye water mixture into your heated (now melted) oils.
Blend the mixture with your stick blender. Trace happens with your oils start to look like a nice thin pudding.
Add your color now.
Keep the traced soap on low on the stove, or just put your crockpot top back on. After 10 - 20 minutes your oils will start to separate and break up. Keep stirring and never NEVER leave your soap alone. If you don't stir on a regular basis, the soap will poof up and potentially creep out of the pan.
Keep stirring. The soap looks like applesauce and then changes to the consistency of mashed potatoes or thick oatmeal.
Before adding the fragrance, add approx. 1 oz. of sunflower oil and stir it in. This will cool the soap down a bit more and make the soap a bit more pliable and wet. Don't worry about calculating that 1 oz. of sunflower oil into your recipe - all this is doing is cushioning the soap in the soap mold, and it will make the soap easier to pop out. The extra oil will eventually evaporate or meld with the soap within 24 hours of unmolding. Once you get the thick nice mashed potato look, add your fragrance to the pot. Mix well.
Once the soap has finished saponification, let it cool for approximately 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Allowing the soap to cool helps prevent fragrance or essential oils from "flashing off" - this happens when the soap is hotter than the evaporation point of the fragrance oil.
Start spooning the soap into your plastic molds, a little at a time (remember your eye protection!) - put the first spoonful in and then tap the mold against the counter several times to disperse any air bubbles. Once the mold is full, place a piece of plastic wrap over it and gently use your fingers and the palm of your hand to move the soap where you want it - make sure it fills the entire cavity of each mold.
Put on your patience hat and wait 5-8 hours before unmolding your soap. Gently press on the bottom of each individual cavity until you can see an air pocket begin to form between the soap and the plastic mold. Follow that air pocket around with your fingers, making it bigger and bigger. Voila! The soaps pop right out! If for some reason this doesn't work, pop the mold into the freezer for 1/2 hour, take out and leave sitting on the counter for 5-10 minutes, and try again.
Additional Notes: I have found that other soap recipes will work well being molded IF and only IF a larger ratio of solid-at-room-temperature oils is used. Olive oil tends to make soap sticky and impossible to move from a mold unless you let it sit there for 2-3 weeks! Choose from Crisco, palm, palm kernel, coconut, white odorless cocoa butter (if you don't want the chocolately smell), lard, tallow, shea butter, mango butter, etc., making those oils a good 80% of oils used. Add other liquid-at-room temperature oils sparingly - a bit of castor for bubbles, a dash of sesame, sunflower, olive, sweet almond, apricot kernel, etc. And don't forget to add that extra 1 oz. of sunflower oil AFTER the cook - I found this step might make or break this technique.
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