Sorry - forgot to do a subscribe on the thread - fixed that now. I have all sorts of advice. More than you want.
If you really want to try it, don't get the soap from the craft store. Go online to a soap supplies website like From Nature with Love or Snowdrift Farm or Brambleberry. Their soap is really high quality and you have a ton of fragrances to choose from. You can also get cosmetic grade colors and pigments - not jut food coloring. Never use food coloring.
I do cold process - from scratch with lye. CP soap is a weird mix of cooking and chemistry - and has all the creativity of both. M&P - where you buy the premade soap blocks, allows for a different sort of creativity, but you can't control the basic product. Look at the Primal Elements site for M&P ideas, too.
I would go on
Amazon or Barnes and Noble and check out some of the books on soapmaking. They will halp a lot when you go to start and give you some basic recipes. They also help you with a lot of the terms used, like rebatch, trace, etc. (Rebatch is basically what you do by doing M&P - using a base recipe to make all different kinds.)
You will need different things depending on what you want to do.
Melt and Pour - M&P - requires a microwave, a bunch of different sized pyrex measuring cups, silicone (high temperature) spatulas, glass pyrex prep cups/dessert bowls, for mixing colors or additives, and any shape of mold you want. I like to do my M&P in Pyrex loaf pans with embedded soap pieces/shapes.
Cold Process and Hot Process require more things and I can go into it if anyone wants. These include stick blenders, non-reactive bowls/pots, and of course a safe place to lock your lye up.
Yay! People who are interested! I'll need to upload some of my soap photos on Flickr, so you can see them. I have some of both types of soap.