So, after much thought, I have decided to give a simple recipe incorporating essential oils. I first saw this on another blog, and embellished it slightly as I made my own. This is a recipe that turns one bar of soap, into a gallon of liquid soap. The original blog I got this from used Mrs. Meyer's soap, and that worked well for them, but upon further comments, it seemed soaps with added moisturizers, like Dove, were not suitable in making the transition, and Mrs. Meyers bar soap is not very easy to find, unless ordered online. Armed with that information, I went to my local Whole Foods, and settled on this triple milled French soap, with the scent of Lemon Verbena. I took a medium grade sturdy cheese grater, purchased strictly for grating soap, and grated it into a large cooking pot...it took me about five minutes.
After it was all grated, it looked like this:
To the grated soap, I added two tablespoons of glycerin(I learned if you added any more that, the finished product gets slightly gooey, which doesn't changed how the soap works, it just makes it a little slimier). Glycerin is a skin softener, and you can find glycerin at your local pharmacy, for about five dollars, and it lasts quite a while.
From here, add a gallon of water, and 'cook' your mixture on medium high heat, until the grated pieces of soap are completely dissolved, which takes about ten minutes. After that, it's waiting about 10 hours or so for your mixture to cool. I checked on it and stirred it around every couple of hours, to keep the consistency even as it cooled.
If the mixture seems like it's getting too 'solid' or 'gloppy', you can beat it with electric mixers, and add a little more water as needed. I did electrically mix mine, but found that I did NOT need to add more water. This is the point, however, where I added the final ingredients-about 10 drops each of lemon and lime essential oils, just to boost the smell a little more. It is not recommended to add the essential oils while cooking the soap, as they can evaporate and leave you with little fragrance.
Here, I stored my finished product in a pitcher, but you can use whatever you have on hand that can be sealed, or has a lid. Also, I had these aluminum containers already, but you can re-use whatever soap dispensers that you may have on hand.
What's great about this recipe, is that it's only limited by your imagination...you can buy completely unscented bars of soap, and add your own essential oil mixes after the cool down process, to create your own, unique scents. Also, this transitions very nicely to body wash you can use in your shower, too. So, after an initial investment of $5 for the glycerin, you can now stretch your dollar and make an entire gallon of liquid soap, for the price of a bar of soap!
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