Making liquid castile soap from bar soap.

[LeahBoo]

I made this today, it worked really well!  

I love the liquid Dr. Bronner's, but it can get costly.  As a result, I would use it pretty sparingly.  Then my local grocery outlet started carrying a brand of organic liquid castile soap called Seattle Organics.  Seattle Organics was made by Ballard Organics specifially to sell in Grocery Outlet stores.  It was $4 for 16 oz, and really great stuff.  I didn't know when they were going to stop selling it, so I stocked up.  I'm still going through my stockpile and I just found out that they went out of business a year ago :(.

So I started looking online to see if I could make it from scratch, if not, I would just go back to Dr. Bronner's.  From scratch seemed like way too much work, but then I kept seeing that people were making it from bar soap!  

The most used recipe online seems to be one bar of soap (not just castile, any kind but dove), 1 gallon of distilled water, and 2 T glycerine to thicken it.  They were winding up with something that had the consistency of snot, but if you blended it with a stick blender or beaters, it got better.  I prefer the consistency of the dr bronners (seattle organics is the same), so I omitted the glycerine.  I also used half the water because I didn't want to chance it not being concentrated enough (I can always add water).  I used a 5oz bar of Dr Bronners hemp almond.

The results is a half a gallon of liquid soap at a cost of $5.  The consistency and strength seem to be just about the same as the Seattle Organics.  

[sunnysandiegan]

Nice! Thank you for the info. :)

[LeahBoo]

Well, I though that was way too easy . 24 hours later my soap is jello. Mixed half and half with water and it was too soupy. Mixed 3/4 soap with 1/4 water and got about the consistency of store bought liquid hand soap. Put both mixes in pump soap dispensers and I'll reevaluate in a day or so.

[LeahBoo]

Update.

I still have two big jars of jello snot :).  It didn't work.  

So I tried it with kirk's castile soap ($3.50 for 3 bars).  1 bar + 10 cups water + 2 tbsp glycerin.  It's perfect.  I actually only made 2 cups, in case it turned to snot.  I bought a foaming soap dispenser (ok, I bought the generic walmart foaming soap for $1.50, and saved the soap that came with it for the laundry), filled it 1/3 with the liquid soap, 2/3 with water.  Foams perfectly!

I figured out that one dispenser-full of foaming soap costs me approximately 12 cents.

[MaryMarg]

Leahboo--Is your soap still not-snot??  We've made soap with the bronner's bar twice, modifying the glycerin but still end up with a gallon of snot-soap, too!!!  Where did you get Kirk's castille??  Thanks!
 

[LeahBoo]

Still not snot . I bought my Kirk's at walmart. It has fragrance, they have an unscented kind too, but I haven't seen it in the store.