Home-made Handsoap

 

*** note from me Dragonflygirl*** the following recipe is not my own, I copied and pasted from the link showing below.  This is my second round with it.  It is THICK...you must add water, as it is challenging to pour into your larger containers...but it's worth the effort:)  Other notes, I like to add a few drops of essential oil into the smaller soap dispensers (not into the mass batch).  I especially love using lavender or peppermint.  Other hint: we  make our own laundry soap (and have been since 2008)...and I plan on doing a couple of other things...this requires shaving bar soap...which isn't fun, especially by hand.  We have opted to grade several bars at a time, using our food processer (I don't know if this will stress the motor, but my engineer hubby came up with the idea, so I'm just going with it:).  Anyway, here's the recipe, and I'm VERY pleased with this soap, both the soap itself and the cost.  (as a note, I purchased my liquid glycerine off Amazon.com; and I find my favorite bar soaps from World Market:)

xoxo

from: http://katiejgibson.blogspot.com/2012/01/frugal-home-series-part-4-homemade.html

"You need:

    8 oz of bar soap (Any bar.  Read the label to make sure your are using 8 oz.  For some soaps, that's one bar, for others it is 2 or 3!)

    2 Tablespoons of Glycerin (found by the bandaids.  You will not find it by the soap.  Trust me on this!  Invest in the $3 bottle and you will have enough for gallons of soap!)

    1 gallon (or 16 cups) of water

    Stock Pot

    Container for soap (trusty milk jug for me!)

First, Grate your soap like it's cheese.  You can use the same technique I used when I made laundry soap.  My soap was rich and would not grate (okay, I don't own a cheese grater.  I have a micro plane and it wouldn't work).  I chunked it and it worked fine.

Put it in a stock pot with the water and glycerin.  Heat on medium heat until all of the soap is dissolved.  This will go by faster if you grated the soap.

When all is dissolved, you will have what looks like soapy water.  Don't worry- you are on the right track!

Take off the heat and let cool/coagulate for 10-12 hours.

It should be like thick snot now.  Beat with a hand-held mixer, adding as much water as you want in order to get your desired consistency.  At this point, I added extra perfume to smell extra pretty =)

Funnel into container and you are in bid-naz!

I found Dial Men's care bars- $2 for 3 bars for my husband.  Smells super manly and you will only use 2 bars, which means a gallon of men's body wash costs a whopping $1.34.  He loves it.  Hoo-rah.

*Edit 3.26.12

Yes, the soap is going to be a little "snotty", no matter how much water you add.  It also doesn't foam well, but suds does not equal clean.  In fact, some company add foam boosters to soaps and laundry detergents because we, as consumers, have been brainwashed into thinking suds does equal clean!"