So if you're wanting to learn cold process soap making at home and how to make homemade soap from scratch, you need to pick up a few basic ingredients.
You need to pick up some lye and some pure water and some pure olive oil or some other pure oil you're going to use to help form your soap.
If you're going to make soap from scratch then you want to get good at the main process of reaching trace with your lye base and oils before you are too concerned about customizing it although that can be the most rewarding part.
Focus on how to safely handle lye so that you don't become uncomfortable with the chemical process of making soap.
This will help soap making at home to be much more rewarding and easy for you.
When handling lye it is a good idea to use safety gloves and goggles as well.
You may want to spread out some newspapers or other coverings over the area that you will be using to make yourself.
And some people prefer to mix the light base outside.
But when you are pouring the lye into your water you want to be careful not to breathe the fumes while you are stirring this new base for the first few minutes.
You want to make sure that you have a pure distilled or softened water and then you will be pouring your dry lye slowly into the water while carefully stirring.
Never pour the water into the lye, remember this is a chemical process and there is a right and wrong way of doing it.
The water carefully according to your measurements and slowly stir for a few minutes.
Then you want to get your pure oil and warm it up while stirring in a separate stainless steel or other safe heating container to about 110 degrees.
Remember the that if you are making Castile oil then you will be using olive oil, but whatever oil you get make sure it is pure 100% oil.
So you'll need to check the label to make sure that even though it says olive oil on the front that it is truly 100% olive oil by checking the ingredients on the back of the label.
And you will warm up your olive oil up to about 110 degrees as well.
And you want to use some safe thermometers in your lye base and in your oil base to make sure they are both 110 degrees.
And then you want to slowly pour the oil into your lye face while carefully stirring in a thorough motion with your spatula.
And you'll need to stir for probably about 30 to 60 min.
until your soap will start to reach trace.
The reason it is called trace is because after about 45 min.
or so you should start to notice a significant but perhaps slight change in the texture of the soap.
You may be starting with your spatula and lift your spatula with some of the liquid to let it drip and you might notice that as it's dripping into the liquid that it traces slightly over the liquid rather than blending in with it right away.
This is what is called trace.
If you have been stirring for over an hour and you have not reached what you think is trace yet, then you have probably made a mistake with measurements or there is some other problem with your technique.
Don't worry, just read over your recipe and try to understand the process a little bit better for next time.
You should soon be able to master this step and get onto customizing your own soap.
Once you are able to become comfortable handling lye and how to reach trace, then you will be able to put more of your focus and attention on different shapes that you want to make with your soap as well as different fragrances or essential oils or natural colorings that you want to add to make your own soap special and more healthy and more unique.
There are literally hundreds of options for how to customize your own homemade soap once you begin to find your own technique and get good at the basics of soapmaking from scratch and handling lye safely.
Consider using indigo or alkanet root powder to help create a pleasing color for your soap shapes that are both natural and colorful.
You can use your own molds out of PVC or buy some soap making molds at a store.