Monday, April 11, 2011

Homemade Dish Soap

I thought I would share a recipe I've been using for the last few months for homemade dish soap. This recipe is a great way to use up cold process soap that may be ugly or imperfect in some way. You can buy "ugly" handmade soap heavily discounted online (go to Etsy and search for ugly soap, you'll have lots of results at your fingertips!). You could also use pretty much any type of bar soap in this recipe provided that it is naturally based. I used a handmade bar of soap from a batch I made awhile back that traced too quickly and didn't turn out as I had planned. You want this recipe to be cost effective, as well as natural - I don't suggest you use a fancy 7$ bar of handmade soap, save that baby for a long bath!

What you'll need,
1 4 ounce bar of soap - I went with an unscented homemade bar.
1 3/4 cups Hot boiling water.
1-2 tsp Liquid Glycerin - this is completely optional but it will give your soap a silkier feel. It's kind of an indescribable difference to the soap, but I really love it.

Onto some good DIY!

Start with your bar of soap,

And grate that baby up!

Plunk it into a pot,

Pour the boiling water over top,

Wait 5 minutes or so for the water to start melting the soap.

Mash like crazy with a fork.

Your soap might start lumping together, this is normal.

Now grab your immersion blender, and blend! You can also pour all of this goodness into a blender and blend. Your mixture will froth a bit.

Blend until all the bits are combined. Near the end of blending add in your glycerin.


Let the mixture now sit for awhile then pour into your favorite dispensing container. I used an old plastic soap pump I already had. Depending on the soap you used you might need to dilute the mixture a bit. You also want all the froth to come down, do not fear it will! I find this soap is great for scrubbing dishes under a running tap or scrubbing dishes first then rinsing in your sink. Because this soap doesn't have oodles of chemical degreasers (it does still cut grease very well) it isn't really effective when pumped into a water filled sink of dirty dishes. My process for using this dish soap is: rinse the sink of dishes, let the water drain, scrub my dishes with a pump of soap here and there and rinse off again. A little bit of this soap really does go a long way!

P.S.,
I'm linking up here, one project at a time!



1 comment:

  1. Great tutorial, thanks! I had never thought about making my own dish soap before.

    ReplyDelete