Welcome to the forum!
The links that Heartsong gave you are excellent starting places to learn about the craft of making soap from scratch with lye.
Melt & Pour (MP) is great to start out with, but it's a totally different animal from CP and HP, just so you know.
While there's no lye to mess with in MP, you have less control over ingredients and other factors than with making CP and HP.
I make mostly CP, but I also make a few occasional batches of HP when I'm dealing with a rebellious fragrance oil. HP is pretty much the same as CP, only it's cooked in a crockpot or on the stovetop or in the oven to speed up the saponification process.
If done carefully, HP can feel and look pretty darn close to CP, but not quite exact. I find CP to be more smooth, fine-textured, dense, and opaque, while HP is more rustic and transluscent. Both feel great in the end after curing, though.
To me, CP is much less fussier to make and easier to pour into the soap mold than HP when it's ready to pour. It also gives me much more leeway to do fancy coloring tricks like pretty swirls and such. You can do swirls in HP, too, but they are much harder to do. My MP swirls never look as finely tuned as my CP swirls.
A very big advantage of HP is that you can use it sooner than CP. A lot of people use their HP right away, but I like to wait at least 2 weeks for mine because I like the extra mildness. And I find that they don't melt away so fast in the shower when allowed to cure for longer as well.
HTH!
IrishLass
