Blogmas Bonus! Lavender Handmade Soap!

I made this soap on November 20th for my Mom, who is an insane lavender fan. Besides some crumbling and acceleration issues I had this was a really fun soap to make!

Base Oils: Avocado butter, cocoa butter, castor oil, coconut oil, olive oil, palm oil, sesame oil
Superfatting: Almond oil
Fragrance: 50/50 Lavender Essential/Lavender Fragrance Oil

For making this soap, I knew I was going to use purple. I wanted some sort of swirl or multi color scheme going on, so I thought white would be a nice contrasting color. As I was setting up my colorants I realized that blue would look really nice, as well. Since blue is my mom's favorite color and this soap was for her, it made perfect sense for me to add it.
My mistake when I added the fragrance was I accidentally pulsed my stick blender when I was mixing the fragrance into the white part of my soap. I had wanted it to be thinner so I could do some sort of drop swirl with the other two colors. That little pulse got the soap to accelerate madly. The end of my pour into the mold looked like the batter was getting very grainy. The purple and blue, however, were not pulsed and poured and swirled very nicely. I just didn't get as much penetration into the white section as I'd wanted. Phooey.
This soap is still a bit soft, though I believe that has to do with the higher amounts of soft oils I used in this recipe. I'm going to have to start looking for more alternatives that give a harder bar but still give the same moisturizing properties. As is my modus operandi, this is a CPOP soap. Because I had titanium dioxide in the soap it was harder to see when the soap had fully gelled. I had to go more by texture. Fortunately my parents' oven is capable of low temperatures like 175 degrees, so I was able to keep the soap in for an extended period without overly worrying about the consequences.
This soap is very bubbly and feels really nice to the skin. My mom loves it! I don't quite love lavender by itself as much as she does, so I don't see myself making this soap again any time soon, but it was a very fun experiment.