Laundry and Soap DIY Continued

In keeping with my previous post I'm going to continue blathering on about my new found homemade recipes!  In addition to my awesome DIY dryer balls I've been using white vinegar in my rinse cycle.  This recipe for homemade fabric softener isn't a dilution of store bought stuff.  It is actually a combination of vinegar and essential oils.  I made the homemade fabric softener and although next time I will add more essential oil I am happy to have something to add to my wash load that leaves a scent for the clothes that don't go into the dryer while reducing static to boot!



Now on to my trials and tribulations of turning bar soap into liquid soap... 

I have been seeing blogs and pins about saving money by making bar soap into liquid soap for quite a while now.  I finally started running low on my liquid hand soap so I decided to give this recipe a try.  I used Grandma's all natural Lye Soap from Ace Hardware because I couldn't find the brand the tutorial used.  Needless to say, the process was long, messy, and labor intensive and the end result, while functional, is not exactly what I was hoping for.  Grating old fashion soap is hard work and makes a crummy mess.  Once I finished that fun, I melted it down according to the tutorial and ended up with an extremely gelatinous pot full of slime.  Two rounds of stick blending later and I gave up on trying to get the right consistency and poured the contents of the pot into an old juice container.  

Conclusion:  Turns out it pumps out of my recycled soap dispensers pretty well considering how thick the end result was.  It has the consistency of snot but despite it's lack of lather, leaves my hands feeling cleaner then my previous store bought liquid hand soap.  So, the hand soap DIY wasn't a total failure but I'm not so sure it was worth the effort.  I'd give it a 6 out of 10.  Useable but the process could use some fine tuning.

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Another bar soap into liquid DIY that I recently tried was turning Dove bars into liquid body wash.  I used this blogger's recipe.  This time, instead of grating 3 bars of soap (lost my patience enough from the last DIY activity) I read through the blog post comments and microwaved the soap for 90 seconds (x3 coincidentally) like someone suggested.  That took way longer then the commenter said it would and I was still left with a decent sized hunk of soap.  I ended up throwing the soap in anyway.  It took FOREVER to liquify and it was damn near impossible to tell when it finally did because the soap made the liquid white.  I had to stand over that pot stirring clumpy soap, inhaling cooking soap fumes for entirely too long.  When I thought everything had incorporated, I poured it into an old juice container using a funnel.  I realized very quickly that the soap had not cooked down completely.  Oh joy.  I was irritated enough at this point to dig out the chunks from the VERY HOT liquid soap and continue pouring until the pot was empty.  I also added some citrus essential oil once it cooled.  

Conclusion:  Adam and I still have body wash to use up but we tried the homemade Dove body wash once in the shower and it works fine.  It is just the right consistency and lathers nicely but you can't smell the essential oils at all.  I am use to body wash that washes away clean so I felt very residue-y after using it.  Also, 3 bars of soap didn't really yield as much liquid soap as I was expecting.  If you buy your body wash while it's on sale I don't think this DIY is really saving you enough money to make it worth it.  

Cleaning the Dove soap residue off the cooking utensils and pot was enough to make me NEVER TRY THIS AGAIN!  I have no idea what Dove is made out of but the only thing I can equate the cleaning experience to is trying to wash SHORTENING off a Pyrex measuring cup, rubber spatula, and large stock pot.  I swear my measuring cup and spatula smelled like Dove soap for weeks.  Bleck!!  The whole experience kind of grosses me out enough not to want to use it because that slimy stink is being left on your skin no matter how much you rinse!  Ewww.