Soap Challenge #2

I was pretty excited to start Week #2 of Amy Warden's Soap Challenge (I'm not doing 1 challenge a week though, just whenever I have time, which happened to be 2 challenges in one weekend.....go me!)
I've never done a milk soap before so I was pretty stoked to give this one a go.  The whole point of the challenges is to (duh) challenge yourself and try something you haven't done before. I've tried most of the things in her challenges, but this being one of them that was new to me.  I have had a can of Coconut Milk sitting at the back of my soap shelf always peeking out at me making me feel bad that I haven't attemped to use it yet.  So I dusted that baby off and got to soaping.
My mom stopped in at my house by surprise and she was glad I was in full soap mode as she keeps telling me she'd like to come and soap with me.  I am a control freak (shocker) and have never tried soaping with another person, let alone having that person help me soap.  I am also impatient, all great qualities of a soaper haha.  I told mom that I was trying out some new projects this weekend and she rolled up her sleeves and asked how she could help.  She didn't get too "hands on" with the project as I told her that I didn't know how fast we'd need to mix and pour in the mold.  But she did help me by cleaning up my kitchen and washing all the soapy dishes and spoons, etc after.  I really hate washing up after soaping......
But anyways, Coconut Milk soap.  I was told that it could take up to 30 minutes to slowly melt my frozen milk with the lye, I told mom this and she wasn't sure if she wanted to stick around and watch them.  I'm used to slowly pouring lye into my beer so it won't volcano on me, so this is nothing new to me.  I can't remember how long it took, but we closely monitored the temperature of the coconut milk and lye and then panicked and decided we had better get the oils and butters melted.  This is where it was really nice to have mom around.  She put the oils in the microwave but they got a little too hot (I was hordering my temperature gun) so we had to put them in some cold water to cool them down.  I think we ended up mixing them around 95 degrees.
I put some cocoa butter and shea butter in this batch to make it extra creamy.  And I scented it with Mango Mandarin (YUMMY) and used a little Apricot Blush Mica to try and do a slight swirl.  I did some peaked tops on it too (another new technique I'm playing around with).

Here it is cut.  You can kind of see a slight swirl in there (mom helped with that too!) but I didn't want it to be too dramatic.  I used a different mold for this batch, and one I've never used before, so I was trying to play around and figure out how I was going to cut them.  They are pretty big, so I'll have to trim the sides a bit.  They'll be tall skinny soaps, something I've grown to luv.  As they are right now, they weight almost 7 ounces! They're huge beasts, so I'll take the knife to them and keep the scraps for myself.  You can just tell by holding this bar that it's going to be super creamy.  I hate waiting for them to cure!

Happy Soaping!