Soap making + first soap

I'm going to use this blog to post the cold process soap projects I've been doing over the last two years. (It's not like I'm using it for anything else these days.) I make soap and take pictures, but I've never put it all in one place. I just made my 15th batch of soap so I have some catching up to do.

Here is the first batch I ever did, 10/21/2014.  I had no mold yet and I lined an loaf pan with plastic. I didn't insulate it or anything, and the edges showed an incomplete gel phase. No picture of the cut bars for this batch.

I decided to make soap for the first time because I had some beef suet from a quarter of beef I'd gotten from a farmer. I rendered it into tallow, and then made this soap using olive oil, beef tallow, and coconut oil. And lye of course, which I'd ordered online.

I read a couple of books which were mostly unhelpful (Ann Bramson's Soap: Making it, Enjoying it is a classic but the methods are very out of date. Robert McDaniel's Essential Soap was better but didn't talk enough about cold process and all the recipes were vegan.) But I found the basic soap tutorial on humblebee & me very helpful, along with some other reading I did on the internet.