Revisiting Soap

This liquid soap has a better consistency!

A while back I posted about an attempt to "make" soap. It worked well enough. However, the soap was very thin and watery.

So I thought I'd give it another go with a different recipe.

This time I tried to reformulate bar soap into liquid soap from two body bars. I love Burt's Bees. It is a relatively "safe" product (more on this to come...I am still researching...) and smelled fantastic!

Ingredients: 2 bars of soap, 2 T vegetable glycerine, 1 gallon water
Tools: cheese grater and large cooking pot.

I bought cheap tools to designate for soap making as I didn't want to mess with my good cooking tools. Unfortunately, I did run into some trouble with my cheap stock pot...it leaked!!!

I grated the two bars of soap into the pot:

 Then added 2 T glycerin and 1 gallon of water:

I set the pot on the stove and turned the temp to medium and left it be until all the soap dissolved. It took about 20 minutes. After that, I removed it from the heat, put a lid on it and left it be until the next day (it's when I had time again....they say it's good to go after 10-12 hours, but I had no trouble 24 hours later).

My pot leaked at the handle fasteners. I put a plastic dish pan underneath and it was no big deal.
That's what cheap kitchenware gets you. Oh well.

 On first appearance, the now liquid soap looked rather solid and I was worried I was going to have to remelt and thin the concoction. My husband suggested that it didn't look that solid and why don't I just try mixing it up? So I stuck my hands in and did just that. Worked like a charm. It was the perfect consistency and I just funneled it into my hand soap containers.

By the way, I am keeping one of these hand soap containers in my shower as body wash. It's more that I'm using body wash as hand soap, instead of the other way around (for those of you who are concerned about those kinds of things).

"Homemade" liquid hand soap!

Remember that milk gallon from the top of the post?...that's my storage container. The two body soap bars yielded 1 gallon of liquid body soap!

PS...I think I used this recipe...but I've been perusing soap recipes so long I'm not sure anymore. They're all really similar.