Yes- you can make liquid soap out of it. All you need to do is dilute it with distilled water, but the trick will be in finding out the best dilution rate/water amount to your liking (i.e. how thick or thin you'd like the end product to be).
Susie brings up a good point: since you have butters in your formula, your liquid soap will not turn out as clear as you might like, but it will still be good liquid soap. One of my liquid soap formulas contains butters and it's quite nice (although opaque).
Since there is no 1 dilution rate that fits all formulas (or people) across the board, you'll need to do a little bit of experimentation, starting out with just a small portion of your 'glop'- which in liquid-soap parlance is referred to as 'paste'- and dilute it with distilled water.
When I'm trying to find out the best dilution rate for a formula, I experiment with just 4 oz. amounts of paste (by weight), and half that amount in distilled water by weight. You basically want to start small with the water and sneak up to your final dilution rate. If you start out with too much dilution water, it takes a bit of extra fuss to correct it (although it can be done).
Just a heads-up: trying to figure out the right dilution rate for a formula is the most time-consuming and frustrating part of making liquid soap, but once you've figured it out, it thankfully never needs to be done again if you were diligent about taking notes/keeping track of how much water you added. It's not unusual to spend a few days or even up to a week to figure out the dilution rate for a formula, but most of it is just a hands-off waiting game. Don't worry- once you have your rate down, it won't take anywhere near as long to make your liquid soap, I promise!
There are a couple of different ways to dilute: the added-heat method and the no-heat method. I kinda use a combo of the two. I start out with heat, but then finish without heat:
I place the paste in a
wide-mouth canning jar of appropriate size (breaking the paste up into up into smaller chunks first), then in a small pot I heat the water to boiling, and then I pour it right over the paste and tightly cover the jar with its lid.
Next, I set the jar in a pot of gently boiling water to heat for a bit. This helps to soften the paste to a jelly-like texture that can easily be stick-blended. I check on things about every 10 to 15 minutes or so by opening the jar and poking at the paste with a skewer to see how soft it is. Once it has become soft as jelly, I stick-blend it, then squeegee the excess soap back into the jar, put the cover back on and place the jar back into the pot, turn the heat off and leave it alone.
If all goes well, you will see it clarify from the bottom up over the next few hours and turn into liquid soap with a large foamy head on it. All is not done yet, though. I need to see how much of that foamy head will dissolve before deciding to add more water or not, so I let it sit on my counter overnight (from here on out I don't use any heat or the stick-blender).
Depending on the formula, much may dissolve, or very little, but I wait until things seem to be at a standstill before deciding to add any extra water to it. If I do add water, I add only a teaspoon at a time (I weigh it first before adding and make sure to jot the amount down in my notes). Then I agitate it/shake the jar......and hunker down and play the waiting game to see how much more dissolves.
When things look to be at a standstill again, I add more water, but depending on how much foam or blobs of paste are still left, I may decide to add less water than a teaspoon. You just have to use your judgment.
Anyway, I keep repeating the above until there's just barely a thin cobwebby wisp of foam on top (about 1/32" or so) before calling it done. If I didn't mind a thinner soap, I
could keep going until every last bit dissolves, but I like mine on the thicker side, so I stop even if there is still a thin wisp of foam on top.
I check my notes and tally up the total weight of water I used per my 4 oz paste, and I use that ratio every time I dilute paste made from that particular formula.
Edited to add- looks like Susie added more to her post just as I was just finishing up mine!
IrishLass
