Home Made soap

I dont know if any of you evr was around Mom during the fall time, but she used to make her laundry soap during that time of year.
In the fall of the year, there was Deer season and the time to kill the pigs and sheep and any steers that was due for the slaughter. She would save all the tallow(fat) and render it all out and make soap out of it. I remember her rendering out the pig rinds and saving the "cracklins" which we could eat, kind of like eating air bubbles, you can still buy them in the stores.
After she had a good sized kettle of this rendered fat she would put it on to cook over a fire in the back yard. My job was to stir the concoction while it cooked, and as she put in the lye that was to do something to the fat and turn it in to something else, anyway I would stir this concoction until she would say that it was done, and then we would pour it out into shallow pans about two or so inches deep. Then we would cut it into small cakes of soap for use later. Some of the soap she would put in the basement before it froze and would shave off small strips to use in doing other things rather than wash clothes.
She always waited until the temprature would be below freezing before we would make the soap, as during the night, the soap would freez the water the was inside of the soap and would leave air bubbles in it. After the soap dried, she would geather it all in and put it in the basement until she needed it. Because of the air bubbles that were left in the soap from freezing, she would just crumble it in her hand and put it into the washer, it was as good as any tide or other store bought soap that you could buy......We made hundreds of pounds of soap this way.....send love and blessings to all, and yes, I do love-yer-guts.............Lonehawk