This past week I made Liquid soap!  I used an old slow cooker.  Mixed olive oil, coconut oil, cocoa butter with potassium hydroxide and water.  I cooked it for 5 hours and everything I have read said that by 3-4 hours I was supposed to have a paste that looked like petroleum jelly sort of translucent.  At 5 hours I had something that looked like mashed potatoes.  I pulled some of it out to dilute into boiling water.  It's supposed to be fairly clear, but mine was murkey cloudy.  But it did lather nicely so I knew it was indeed soap.  I have read that if the liquid soap is cloudy then it probably needs to cook longer.  Well, I needed to go to sleep so I had to turn the slow cooker off.   The next night I cooked for a couple more hours.  It still looks like mashed potatoes, maybe a little less opaque, but no where near petroleum jelly.  I determined that after 7 hours of cooking that it was DONE.

Tonight I am in the process of diluting my paste with later to make liquid soap.  I heated the paste and water in the slow cooker.  The paste is just about melted into the water.  This liquid soap looks much more clear than the tester.  So maybe indeed the paste needed to cook longer.  I need to find a container to store the 6.5 lbs of liquid soap I just made.  I think that's about a gallon.  I'm going to keep this whole batch uncolored and unfragranced.  That way when I pour it into smaller containers I can decide what fragrance and/or color to use.  I don't want to use the same color and/or fragrance for the whole batch. 

Was it worth it to do all of this work rather than buy liquid soap at the store?  Hmm… saved a little money, but spend a lot of time on it.  But it's a true soap, without any synthetic detergents which so many of the store bought liquid cleansers contain.  Have you looked in the ingredients of your liquid cleansers?  Ever seen Sodium lauryl sulfate (SLS), sodium laurilsulfate
or sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS or NaDS), or Sodium laureth sulfate, or sodium lauryl ether sulfate (SLES)?  These are all detergents and surfactants.  I can say for sure that I have liquid SOAP and I know exactly what's in it.  Is it worth it?  I liked making it.  It was a good experience and I'd do it again.  Especially now that I know what to expect.  Not sure why my soap took so long to cook.  Maybe it's the slow cooker.  Anyway, I'd make it again.