liquid soap

Yesterday I made some liquid soap. It's not something I've done before, and I wasn't really planning on doing it either, but, well, sometimes we're taken off in directions we hadn't imagined before...

It all started when I made my last batch of soap, broke the thermometer so had to guess temperatures, then got all overenthusiastic adding oatmeal to it. Er, it didn't set. I dutifully reheated it, and it set, but was a bit too crumbly to use as soap. So it's sat on the windowsill for a few months because I couldn't bear to throw it away.

The other day I was idly reading through the archives of Rhonda Jean's blog, and came across a post where she'd made some liquid soap. I know she's made some more recently, from scratch, but this way of doing it appealed because it seemed basically to involve dissolving hard soap in hot water and letting it cool. Aha, I thought, I can use up the crumbly bits of soap I have left!

So, this is what I started with...

Those big pieces don't look too bad, so I removed them, emptied out the small crumbled bits, and then grated some of the smaller big bits, and landed up with this...

Which I put in a pan of water on the stove. Rhonda recommended one bar of soap to two litres of water, but since my soap wasn't really in bars, I just used some. Once it was all dissolved, which took about half an hour just heating slowly, I left it to cool. And this morning, I filled old washing up liquid bottles and a small fancy glass bottle that used to hold sloe gin.

I've got a bottle in the kitchen to use as washing up liquid and general purpose cleaner, a bottle in the bathroom that I've added a few drops of tea tree oil to, and I'm also going to experiment with using it as shampoo. I've been trying to replace cheap and chemically shampoo for a while now, but I can't justify spending £5 a bottle on lovely organic stuff.

I did try using bicarbonate of soda and vinegar, but found that the first wash was fine, after the second and third, my hair was looking greasier and greasier. Hmm. My hair's quite long these days, so maybe that was the problem.

Anyway, this soap is just soap, just plain olive and coconut oil soap (with oatmeal in, but I tried to sieve most of that out!), so I'll experiment and let you know how it goes...