I know everyone has seen blogs about making liquid soap from a bar of soap, and I know there's good tutorials out there, but this not a tutorial.
I tried this once before using an inexpensive bar soap, I read, that they work best when making liquid soap. Unfortunately it turned out snotty and I didn't know how to fix it. Well since then I have been doing a lot of reading and decided to try it again.
This time I thought I would try using Dr. Bronner's Castile Soap. Since I suffer from eczema, I found this is the best soap for me.
I started out with Dr. Bronner's Rose scent soap:
I used my cheese grater and started grating:
I started out with 6 cups of water and turned up the heat and stirred until the soap slivers dissolved, it looked foamy, but I took it off the burner and let it set:
It set for about 4 - 5 hours, when I mixed it, I found it was snotty. So I but it back on the burner to dissolve it and poured in 4 cups of water. It set over night.
In the morning, I stirred it and to my surprise, it was still snotty. I poured 4 more cups of water, this time I didn't put it on the burner, I took out my blender, and blended the soap mixture. It was a little more runny than store bought liquid soap, but it's not snotty. I ended up with 4 1 qt jars and 1 8oz jar of liquid soap.
I have read about people adding glycerin to their soap, I didn't add any to mine because Dr. Bronner's is already made with oils and doesn't contain any of the harsh ingredients other soaps do, I didn't think it was necessary to add anything else to retain moisture.
I think the amount of water you add to your soap, whether you have hard/soft water and maybe altitude, has a lot to do with how your soap turns out, some soaps require more water, some less, and others may need glycerin. It's all trial and error.
So there, out of a $4 bar of soap, I ended up with roughly a little over a gallon of liquid soap. You can use this liquid hand soap or body wash.
