the Oil Crowd

Foaming hand soap infused w/ oils, homemade Thieves oil

When I recently placed an order at sunburst bottle company, I noticed that their foaming hand soap containers were on sale for .70 each.

I bought one for each bathroom in the house, and when they arrived, I mixed up a foaming hand soap formula with premade Thieves oil using this formula:

12-16 drops of the oil blend
2 Tbsp hand soap, shower gel, or similar liquid soap (unscented would be best- and avoid the ingredient triclosan.  Bad stuff.)
Water to the top of the container

I heated the water to help the soap dissolve into it, and stirred gently in a large mixing cup before pouring the mixture into the bottle.  That's it!  And now whenever we wash our hands, some of the essential oil formula leaves its scent (and its germ-fighting properties) on our hands.  Fantastic.

I'll be buying more of the containers soon... this project is going to become Christmas presents for our friends and family.  I think Thieves is a great holiday scent!

Homemade Thieves Oil
If you'd like to mix up your own Thieves blend, here are the oils involved in YL's blend:

Clove (Syzygium aromaticum)
Lemon (Citrus limon)
Cinnamon bark (Cinnamomum verum)
Eucalyptus radiata
Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis CT 1,8 cineol).

And here are two recipes available in several different places on the web:

The Easy Recipe:
Equal amounts of eucalyptus, rosemary, cinnamon, clove and lemon.

The Less Easy Recipe:  (our own Marsha's been very happy with this one)
Clove bud oil 8
Lemon oil 7
Cinnamon bark oil 4
Eucalyptus 3
Rosemary 2

(The ratio numbers can be applied to any measurement you'd like... drops, teaspoons, ml, etc.  There's a total of 24 parts in the recipe-- so if you're using teaspoons, you'll end up with 24 teaspoons of theives oil-- 1/2 cup.  24 drops of Thieves oil would be about 1 ml, so multiply the recipe by 5 if you want to fill a 5ml bottle.)

Random Oil Fact:
Apparently there are between 20-35 drops of essential oil in each ml (or 100-175 drops in a 5ml bottle), depending on the thickness of the oil/size of the drops.

Edited to Add:  Homemade Liquid Soap
Found a very simple recipe for homemade liquid soap, and thought I'd share.  I just used my liquid soap on hand for my batch, but I'll be trying this next.  You can buy bars of castille soap at the health food store; a simple soap like Ivory would probably work well too.  Dr. Bronner's makes great natural soaps too, including an unscented version (buy at the health food store, and read the bottle for entertainment-- nutty stuff there).

The basic recipe is: Put about two cups of shaved castille soap in a bowl, and pour four cups of boiling water over it (2:1 boiling water to grated castille soap is the basic ratio), stir it up, let it cool, and pour it into a bottle.  That's it!