I did not know that yesterday!

A Yahoo! search on "soap making" led ume to the Arts > Crafts > Soapmaking category, where we found about a dozen sites. After clicking on a few, I ended up at the informative Soap Making site. After browsing the site, I clicked on Basic Instructions and found an easy-to-follow guide for making soap from scratch.

The basic ingredients:

Water - For best results, use rain, distilled, or soft water. You should generally use 6 oz. of water to 16 oz. of fat. Lye - An extremely dangerous ingredient that should be handled with the utmost care. Fats and oils - Fats for soap making include animal fats such as tallow (fat from beef), lard (fat from pork), and the various
plant-derived oils. (Each fat requires a different amount of lye to change it to soap so visit the site's Lye to Fat Ratio Table for a list of the different fats and the amount of lye required to convert them to soap.)
You'll also need coloring dyes, fragrance oils, and some other ingredients, but the supplies above are the essentials for any aspiring soap maker.

For a long list of online retailers who sell soapmaking supplies, check out Yahoo!'s Soapmaking category, located under Business and Economy.

Check out these other soapmaking sites for instructions, recipes, and some good clean fun: About.com's Candle and Soapmaking page, the Handmade Soapmakers Resource, and SoapTeacher.com.