DIY Liquid Hand Soap

Today I decided to try out yet another DIY project from One Good Thing by Jillee, making my own liquid hand soap and a mason jar soap dispenser!  It was something I had never done before, but it ended up being a lot of fun!  So this is the basic recipe:

1 Gallon of purified water

2 Tablespoons of glycerine

8 Ounces of your choice bar soap

I wasn't sure what Ivory soap smelled like (I don't use bar soap ever)  but it was on clearance at Target so I thought I'd give it a try.  Unfortunately I bought 32oz of this stuff and I'm not a huge fan of the smell.  Fortunately my husband doesn't mind it too much.  I think next time I will go with an unscented soap and add some Tangerine or Grapefruit essential oil to it.  I had this little bottle of glycerine sitting in my cupboard from my first attempt at making fondant (before I discovered marshmallow fondant!) and had no use for it, until now!!  Finally, I just got water out of my refrigerator dispenser.  It took FOREVER, but according to Jill the soap will be more affective if the water is purified, and this is all I had.

First, grate your soap.  I've heard of people blending it or using a food processor, but I was nervous about using my precious expensive equipment on soap making.  Now that I know how soft the soap is, I might consider blending it next time, but really grating it took no time at all.

It looked like a plate of mozzarella cheese!  Fortunately it didn't smell like it or maybe I would have taken a bite.. ;)  Kidding.  So next you add the grated soap to the water and heat it up to melt the soap.

Stir it up to get all the little pieces of soap melted.  It takes a little while, I think it took me around 10 minutes before I stopped seeing soap pieces.  I kept it on the heat for a few extra minutes just to make sure.

 It will foam up a little from the stirring.  Remove from the heat and add the glycerine.  Then I poured it into a container and let it sit, about 24 hours or until cooled completely because that's what I saw Jill do on her blog.  I think next time I will just let it sit in the pot it's in because I really don't see the need to move it to another container.  Plus the container I used was too small and even after I poured some into a cup, I still had too much and I dumped a little.

Once it is completely cooled, it becomes this gelatinous substance that will need mixed up before put into its final storage containers.  To be honest, the soap looks kind of gross after it's mixed up.  It looks like snot.  Maybe I should have whisked it better, I don't know.  My husband has asked me to add a little food dye to it because it looks, umm, gross is all I'm going to say.  So our soap is purple and pink and blue and all sorts of colors because the dye was added after I portioned it out.  Anyway, I loved the idea of mason jar soap pumps so I decided to make 3, one for each sink in the house!!  I followed Jillee's tutorial about it and it was pretty easy!  I'm not going to go step by step through that, but you can follow her blog for instruction how to make them.  The only problem I had was that she starts the hole where the dispenser goes through with an exacto knife, which I did, but the very first one I tried, the tip of the knife snapped off!  So I just ended up using the sharp pliers, wire cutters maybe?  But they turned out pretty good, I think!

I loved the idea of simply unscrewing the top of an empty jar and just sticking a pump lid onto another full jar!  I love it and I hope you will too!