About a year ago a few good friends of mine and I got together and made bar soap. It was a wonderful time of learning, fellowship, and well....soap making! I felt slightly old fashioned and very frugal, both of which were good feelings :-) I still have that soap and sadly we are down to our last two bars. However, making the soap was a lot of work, and buying the initial ingredients wasn't super cheap either. But when I read that you can make your own liquid hand soap easy AND cheap, I was in! It really is one of the easiest things I have done. So, in the event that you might not yet be on the frugal, do-it-yourself bandwagon, here is something cheap and easy to get you started. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, this is wayyyyyyyyy healthier than the soap you buy in the store. This can be a completely natural soap with NO chemicals or parabans.
You first start with....
~ a bar of organic (or natural) Castille soap (trader joes, health food stores, even target carries these)
~ a small bottle of Glycerin (super easy to find. I bought mine at CVS)
~ scented oil of your choice (or tea tree oil for its anti-bacterial properties.) OR no oil at all. It is not required for the soap.
As you can see in my picture above, I have a bar of soap, a cheese grater, two small containers for oil and my Glycerin. The two small green bowls holds my Tea Tree oil and Jojoba oil.
Next you grate. And grate. And grate. And grate. When you feel your hands and muscles burn like fire, then suck it up, call yourself a sissy and push on. Your usually only halfway done ;-)
After you grate you pour our grated soap in a pot
Then you cover it with water (a lot of people measure this out, but that's not my style, so I cannot remember how much water I used. Maybe 5 cups??)
Once you have sufficient amounts of water in there, then put it on your stove on low and stir occasionally until all the soap is melted. Mine even turned clear and I thought I had done something wrong like added too much water. I thought it would be gloppy or at least slightly thick. No. That happens over night. It actually turned out that I needed to add much more water than I did because mine became way too thick originally. If this happens to you then just put the soap back in the pot the next day, add more water, and heat on low again. Then let it set overnight and viola, perfect hand soap.
But I digress. Where was I? Oh yes, the melting. So while you are starting the melting process and you notice that most, if not all, of your shavings have melted, then add your tablespoon of Glycerin and your oils if your using oils (I used around a teaspoon of each tea tree oil and jojoba oil).
When you are certain your soap has melted, allow mixture to cool down for about 30 minutes then pour into a container. I used a jar, but had I added the amount of water that I should have, which I later ended up doing, it would not have fit in the jar, so be prepared to pour it into something semi-large.
Lastly, let it sit overnight and thicken. When you check it the next day, if it is of desired consistency (kind of like egg whites or thicker), then grab your funnel and pour into old washed out hand soap bottles. I love seeing my new soap that I made for about less than a dollar a bottle, put into containers of hand soap that I bought for $4.50 a bottle. Have I mentioned before how I love the feeling of saving my hubster some money????
The end product should fill AT LEAST 3 bottles with some leftover (I probably could have filled four bottles but I didn't have a fourth bottle, so I had to stick the rest in a jar.
And there you have it.
Oh and by the way, just ignore those insane amounts of crumbs on my table. That was just a trick of photography. They're not really there ;-
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