Blue, it's usually safe to go with about 33% lye solution. That is two parts water to one part lye (For instance: if your recipe calls for 5 oz. of lye, you would use 10 oz. of water...that would give you a 33.33% lye mixture, which is a good middle of the road solution).
Before you make anymore soap, you should read-up a bit more on oil characteristics... you know, what makes soap "tick" according to what oils/fats you use. Do a LOT of forum reading and try to learn by other people's mistakes as well as their successes.
Some oils add bubbles but not much else. Some oils add stability to the lather. Some oils add gentleness. Some oils add high cleansing. You want a "balanced" soap. One that cleans well but does not dry-out your skin. One that is firm but not too soft, or too hard to cut.
A couple of rules of thumb:
1. For an the average soap recipe, you will need a high-lather oil for about 10 to 20% of your recipe. High lather oils are coconut, palm kernel or babassu (the latter being the most expensive of the three most common ones).
2. You'll need a "base" hard oil that will give your bar hardness and stability to the lather. Good ones for this are: palm, lard, tallow, vegetable or meat fat shortenings, and olive oil. Olive oil adds a lot of hardess, but it makes a more gel-like lather. It is good used in moderation (10 to 30%) unless you are going for a more "castile" type soap. Your base hard oil will be around 40 to 60% of your recipe (sometimes a little more or less....these are ballpark figures). Using combinations of hard oils is a fantastic idea as some oils/fats complement each other really well. Example: lard and olive oil go really well together, as does lard/tallow, vegetable shortening and olive, the combinations are endless.
3. A good "soft oil" is used to help balance out the bar and make the solid soap more manageable. Good ones are canola, safflower, soybean, sunflower, castor. Thes oils are good used at about 5 to 20% of the recipe (the more you use, the softer and stickier the soap will be when you go to cut it, but it will usually firm up well if you don't use too much water). You can combine more than one in a recipe, like using canola and castor, or safflower and castor. Again, the possibilities are endless.
Castor used at over 10% can make a soap pretty sticky and hard to get out of the mold unless you balance it out with a good hard butter or palm.
These are basics. Not set in stone, but guidelines.
*NOTE: Specialty oils and butters should be tried later on down the road, after you have a few good batches under your belt and you have a real good feel for your oils and how they soap. This will
really help you down the road to trouble-shoot problems you might have in the future when you are experimenting with newer stuff.
Hope this helps sweetie! I am no expert, but I've been making soap for well over ten years for daily use and for sale, so I have made some messes and learned some lessons! LOL.