Teresa - I make real soap (not melt and pour). I don't use goat's milk; for most of my soaps I use buttermilk as the solvent for the lye. I have very dry skin (and I'm something of a compulsive hand washer), so commercial soaps and even most hand crafted soaps (I've found that out the hard way) are not good for my skin. I highly superfat my soaps (superfat = excess of fats above what is needed to use up all the lye), as that is what works best for me. (Some people may not like the feel.)
Robin - How the soap smells depends on what you make it with. Soap made without any kind of fragrance oil, or undeodorized fats, or other additives, smells like Ivory soap. (That is not a scent that I really care for.) I don't often use fragrance oils, though tomorrow or maybe the day after I will make some soap for my sister, using a fragrance oil that mimics her favorite perfume. For myself, I usually scent the soap with essential oil of spearmint (or, sometimes, peppermint); by the time it cures, the soap is mildly scented. The spearmint soap is very nice to use in the shower; the peppermint soap is best as a hands-and-face-only soap.
However, you can have interestingly scented soaps just from the ingredients, without adding fragrance or essential oils. Milk soaps made with oat flour and honey have been described as having a "Bit o Honey" (candy type) scent. I sometimes make a soap where the fats are 70% coconut and/or palm kernel oil, 30% undeodorized cocoa butter - that smells faintly like cocoa or chocolate. Best not to shower using
that if you are hungry...
Getting back to the garden...
I haven't been out there yet today (and I'm going to first have to Walk Warp, which is a time and energy sucking endeavor, and then have lunch). The Plan is to finish potting up 'Afternoon Delight', and maybe also get the larger rhizomes replanted in the ground, so I can be Done With That. There will be another round of pot watering (all those iris pots...). Check for progress on the daylily seedlings and seed pods. I was planning on planting out one of the PCI irises, but my garden helpers (they had to do the digging, the ground was too compacted for me) dug the hole in the slightly wrong spot. Maybe I can chip away at it so as to shift it, so I can get the PCI placed where I want it to be, but that will only be after those other tasks get done first, and if I have any energy left, and if the mosquitoes aren't starting to attack.
