I’ve been playing around with making soap. By that I mean, I haven’t made soap in almost 2 years and my husband got tired of buying soap so he took the kid out for a morning and told me to get to it. (Well, not really, but my way doesn’t make as good of a story. The part about not making soap in 2 years is true however… ahem!)
Here’s what came out of the experiment 4weeks ago (8 pounds of soap). I’ll state what I’ve said before about soapmaking – if you know what you’re doing, you can have a ton of fun. But over the two batches of soap that I made that weekend (I also used this recipe as a starting point and made “cafe” soap!) I burned myself with lye twice. Once was bad enough that I was still putting aloe on it by the second day.
Be careful! I take no responsibility for your carefulness or not. 
I used a new ingredient in my soap recipe – castor oil. I love it so far and think I’ll be using it as a base oil in all my soap recipes. I love the feel of movement that homemade soup has – take a look at the swirls in the tops of the bars above. That, right there – that’s beauty to me!
If you’re interested in my previous soapmaking expeditions….
old, OLD soap pictures – but oh so pretty!
Some more old pictures…
And, one of my actual recipes for the more adventurous of you out there.
Enjoy
