Sunday, May 12, 2013

Make Your Own Hand Soap!


After I made our laundry detergent I began thinking about making our own hand soap. So, I Googled recipes for hand soap and of course scoured Pinterest and found that you only need 3 ingredients! 



Ingredients: 
Water -1 Gallon
Bar of Soap (without moisturizer)
Liquid Glycerin - 2 TBSP

I used Distilled water and had no problems, but I'm sure you could use any water you'd like. As for the soap, a lot of people who had made their own hand soap had problems when using a moisturizing soap, like Dove, so I chose Dr. Bonner's Magic soap- it's organic and fair trade- in peppermint, it smells wonderful. I found the liquid glycerin in the cake decorating isle at Michael's. So, the total for this experiment has been:

Water: $1 from Target
Soap: $4.17 from Target
Glycerin: $2.99 from Michael's
Totaling: $8.16 + tax

To make the soap  all you do is grate your bar of soap, which I repeatedly called cheese (due to the grating).


Pour your gallon of water into a HUGE pot, add your grated soap and glycerin. Stir over medium heat until all of your soap is dissolved and then let your mixture sit overnight- for at least 10 hours. 


It won't look very exciting before you go to bed...just be patient. :)  In the morning, it will look much more soap like. Stir it around to make it more consistent and then viola you have a year's (or more) supply of liquid soap!!


All of our soapy goodness!!
Enjoy!





2 comments:

  1. We mostly use foam soap bc otherwise my 2 little girls go through soap like its water. Do you think your soap could be turned into foam soap (basically just diluting it with more water...one part soap to four parts water)? I would love to do this if so!! Good work & I love the peppermint choice!

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    1. I was intrigued by your question, so I dug out an old foam dispenser and filled it with a bit of soap and water to try it. It worked...ish.The soap is a little runny as it is. I tried it without adding water and it worked too. It will probably depend on what your girls constitute as foamy. I think there would be some tweaking during the melting stages to make it work better. I can bring you some of the soap if you'd like to try it first. Good luck!

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