Making Your Own Liquid Soap from Bar Soap

I read about making liquid soap from bars of soap in Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living, and it seems so common sense now that I've tried it. Not only does it save quite a bit of money, it also saves all those plastic liquid soap dispensers from going in the landfill.

Making liquid soap is incredibly easy:

Using any pure soap (Ivory, Kiss My Face Olive Oil Soap, etc.), grate the bar of soap and measure the shavings. In my case, I grated about half a cup of shavings. This used just over 1/4 of my 4 ounce KMF bar.

Boil an amount of water equal to your shavings. If you grated 1/2 cup of soap, boil 1/2 cup of water. I have found it works better if you use larger amounts, like 3/4 or 1 cup, presumably because the water stays hotter longer.

Add boiling water to shavings and let stand for about 5 minutes to begin melting the shavings.

Using a wire whisk, vigorously whisk the mixture until the shavings appear to be melted. You'll probably work up a bit of a foam on top of the mixture. That's fine, just leave it as part of the soap. You'll also probably end up with some small lumps, depending on how well the soap melted. I ignored these rather than pull my hair out trying to get a totally smooth mixture.

After you've whisked the soap and water mixture, let stand again for 10-20 minutes to allow it to cool off a bit. Once it's cooled, pour it into your liquid soap dispenser and enjoy!

Depending on the type of soap you try, you can experiment with adding more or less water. I found with KMF soap it had to be exactly a 50/50 mixture or the soap was too diluted to work effectively.