Tuesday, January 29, 2013

Make liquid soap from bar soap

While I know this doesn't have anything to do with sewing I wanted to share with everyone my experiment.
  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.

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Tweed Cape

This has been a project that was set aside last year, mostly because I screwed up cutting out the pattern and I didn't have enough fabric to correct my mistake.  This year I decided I would just make the best of it and try to salvage what I had.  I think it turned out pretty good considering my screwing it up.  The pattern didn't call for it to be lined, but I decided to line it because it would make it warmer and I thought the tweed would be to itchy on the skin.  I lined it with a black fleece and I'm so glad I did, it's so warm.  I contemplated several options for closures since I  decided not to go with buttons, because my buttonhole making skills are not the best and I wanted this to look nice, I settled on Chinese frog closures, I may change this and go with large toggles, they seem pretty easy to sew on.  All in all I'm pretty satisfied with the way it turned out, I just wish I hadn't waited  a year to finish.