Homemade Liquid Hand Soap

One of my new favorite ways to pass the time (mostly when I am stuck on the couch nursing!) is to cruise Pinterest. All of the DIY crafts, home design and recipe ideas are so compelling, I want to try them all! One idea that seemed pretty approachable was homemade liquid hand soap (over one gallon made from a single bar of soap!) Here is a link to the original blog post: http://familyoffarmers.blogspot.com/p/diy.html. 


I chose to try it out with a bar of Green Tea scented French-milled soap with Shea Butter. It is more expensive than Dove or whatever, but I thought it was okay to splurge when you can turn it into a gallon of hand soap! 

This turned into a wonderful hand-soap:
it has a nice light scent that even my
husband loves, and leaves hands super soft.

The recipe was pretty straightforward. Grated up the soap just fine with the cheese grater, although it took forever to wash the chunks of soap caught in the grates. I found the glycerin from a natural health food store in town called Capella Market (I couldn't find the liquid glycerin in any regular grocery or drug store that I went to). The soap dissolved into the glycerin and water fairly quickly over the medium-high heat, so I turned it off to let it sit and start to cloud up. 

My batch didn't take long at all (just a few hours) to cool and harden into a stiff gelatin consistency. Working in batches, I added more water and used a hand mixer to get the soap into a consistency that I liked.

I bought a pretty glass container with a pump for our bathroom (cost about $5), and then reused an old handsoap container for the kitchen. The liquid glycerin cost about $7 for a medium-sized bottle, but the recipe only calls for 2 T. to one gallon of water. The soap cost about $6. Overall, about a $20 investment for a never ending supply of hand soap!