Oh....my, yes. I spent probably 6 years completely obsessed with making soap; and I do mean COMPLETELY obsessed. I started up my own business and was selling my soap in I think 6 different countries through my site. Problem was the profit margin was tiny so instead of having a job and a hobby I ended up with 2 jobs and finally quit in 2008. Still have my scales and molds and some of my oils though....every once in awhile I whip up a couple batches for my own use but my base oils are finally starting to go rancid. (Surprised they didn't go sooner, honestly)
I'm pretty far out of date on stuff now though...I don't know if Brambleberry is still in business but they were my absolute favorite for buying fragrance oils - huge selection and they test each one in cold process. My base oils & lye was all bought locally; I was fortunate enough to live near a soap supplier and I was buying 5-galon buckets of Palm, Coconut & Palm Kernal oils through them; and smaller amounts of things like Cocoa butter. Pomace olive oil I bought by the gallon at a restaurant supply store (also local). That was when I was living in Sacramento; I just checked and looks like they changed location but are still in business. No idea what their shipping prices are like though:
http://www.soapsalon.net/ I recommend looking locally for supplies as much as possible....oil is HEAVY and you will likely pay a lot in shipping.
About the only fat I bought online was shea butter, and I would get in on co-op free trade buys and buy it bulk directly from African villages (so awesome to support those women directly, and the quality was usually amazing!)
A great resource, and a place where I spent countless hours, is a forum called Soaper's Asylum. I just googled it and it looks different but seems to still be thriving! That's where I joined up on co-op buys and learned a TON of stuff.
MMS is another good site (Majestic Mountain Sage) - their lye calculator is amazing and they have some good supplies too. (Or did, anyway...)
I recommend playing around...I made so many experimental batches and had so much fun with it. Aside from normal experiments with milk and honey and oats and the like, I aslo made soap with wine, with beer, with kool-aid, with crayons...I even tried making soap with Tang! (Made the soap really lathery - probably from all the sugar - but none of the scent came through regrettably)
Try carrot babyfood in your soap. No kidding, makes the soap lather really creamy! One of my most expensive soap lines had carrot babyfood as an ingredient and I couldn't keep it in stock.
Silk is another good one, add about a 1" square of pure silk fabric to your lye water. It'll dissolve completely but your lather will feel silky! Oh, and hair does the same thing, LOL - my dog soap contained dog hair!! After washing my lab I'd salvage her hair from the drain and use it in soap. Dissolved into the lye water, it's the proteins from silk & hair that give that later that creamy feel. That got lots of laughs and comments when people would read the ingredients!
And then there's technique!! I see a bit of ash on your soap there, do you force gel on your batches or let them go cold? Do you do full cold process or one of the modified versions? My favorite version was a totally bastardized version of cold process - RTOP is what we called it: "room temperature oven process". I would heat my solid oils just to melting point, no heat added to the liquid oils. Let the lye water cool until the pitcher was comfortable to touch bare-handed, then blend at "room temperature". (Quickly, because it'd go to trace immediately) Pre-heat the molds in the oven, pour the soap into the warm mold then toss it back into the warm oven (oven OFF at this point) and force gel.
I'm not sure how new you are, you may not know what gel is!! If not, don't worry, you'll learn! (And nothing at all wrong with the ash on your soap, btw, it just makes me think you didn't go to gel, which is an optional/preference sort of thing and that's all. Ash on soap is totally normal.) Your soap looks lovely and it sure does bring back some happy memories!
OK, and this email is way too long now! Ask me questions if you like! I'm out of date but this was a major obsession for me, for years.
