We have had a couple of successes and failures here lately.
Inspired by
this post over at My Girl Thursday I embarked on a journey to make my own bubble bath. I've been wanting to find a recipe that works for a while and the last bottle that I bought at Shoppers smells like gum mixed with toilet bowl cleaner and it a horrible blood red mixed with rotting grape juice color. I really have to find another option because we do consume a lot of bubble bath around here. So - I found a recipe and gathered my materials.
I shredded the bar of soap and left it to dissolve in water.
It didn't seem to be doing it so I put the mixture on some low heat and that did it. I mixed in the glycerin and put it in the bottles, expect for a little that I saved to put in the bath that night. When we went to mix in the bath that night we found this:
Semi solid gelatinous sludge. We mixed it into the bath anyway and didn't get any bubbles. Then we added the store bought bubbles and didn't get any bubbles. We have created the anti-bubble bath. Not what I was looking for. Failure #1.
The next is a failure and a success. Our dish washer has not been working very well lately, not really washing and leaving a film on all our dishes. My mother was even thinking of washing all of our dishes by hand to get them clean. So - I thought I would try changing soap to see if that helped. With a small package of phosphate rich chemical dish soap we gave it a try and got this. Can you tell which is the all natural soap and which is the phosphate?
The difference in real life is even more dramatic. Chemicals: 1 Julia: 0
And finally - a rousing success. I organized and finished staining the shed this week. I don't have a good "before" picture but suffice it to say that it didn't look this good. So I haved added a couple of years to an old shed before all the wood needs to get pulled off and thrown away. Overall I think my environmental footprint ends up about even. I am still on the lookout for a good, homemade bubble bath if anyone has any ideas.
1 comment:
"Hardness" minerals (mostly calcium, secondarily magnesium) in the water react with soap to form lime soaps, which as you've discovered not only don't bubble but also are effective anti-foams against other foaming agents. Yes, the anti-bubble bath.
I developed my own recipe, even got a US patent, for a non-irritating formula that makes a very dense foam when splashed in bath water, as you can see here, but not a commercial success and not made from grocery or drug store ingreds.:
diammonium lauryl sulfosuccinate
lauramidopropyl betaine
(even better mixed with a little palmitamidopropyl betaine)
disodium laureth-3 sufosuccinate
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