DIY with The Fab Miss B: Make your own Dish Soap

I'm getting more and more interested in making as much as I can from scratch, from granola to body scrubs to cleaning products. It's frugal. I know every single thing I'm putting in my body or environment. There is less waste. I'm not paying for packaging or chemicals I don't need or want. Why not?

I used this recipe to create a dish soap for washing dishes by hand. You will need:

1 bottle (find a pretty vintage one! Mine is from an Antique shop.)

1 Pouring Spout

liquid measuring cup

chopstick to stir!

2 parts castille soap (any soap made from Olive Oil. Mine is unscented Dr. Bronner's soap)

1/2 part warm water

essential oil to your taste (I used Hawaiian ginger- it has such a fresh clean scent! Here's the set of essential oils I swear by.)

First, fill your bottle with water and pour it into the liquid measure. This will help you figure out how much you want to make. Then do the math to figure out how much castille soap to use. You want to parts soap to 1/2 parts warm water. Stir the mixture gently with the chopstick, you don't want to agitate it too much, just enough to combine the two. Then add a few drops of essential oil. Sometimes the scent gets lost, I added 8-10 drops of oil in mine. Mint, lavender, ginger or eucalyptus would all be nice for dish soap since they have clean, invigorating scents. Then pour it into the bottle, using the chopstick to dispel bubbles that may form at the neck as you pour. Add your stopper spout and you're all set!

This is definitely not the texture you are used to with commercial dish soap- it's much less viscous, only slightly thicker than water. Because it has no sulfates or parabens, this soap does not offer the same lather that regular dish soap does. It also turns a little milky looking in water. I think in my next batch I will experiment with adding a little white vinegar to give it more oil cutting power. Overall, I like having the control over the fragrance and ingredients and the fact that I didn't pay Proctor and Gamble for it.

Have you experimented with making your own cleaning or bath products? What are the pros and cons in your opinion?