Years of curiosity satisfied.

Ok, so this weekend we didn’t have a lot planned but got a lot of running around done and Beth finally got to satisfy some curiosities… About laundry soap. Beth always wanted to try her hand at making homemade laundry soap but hadn’t ever gotten around to it, and this weekend was the weekend after many weeks of talking about it. We were out running errands most of the day so we picked up all of the goodies to make it. We had a couple different recipes but they all consisted of the same ingredients (for the most part). The real difference was the dilution, more on that later.

So the ingredients are pretty basic and cheap. All you need is Borax, Arm and Hammer Washing soda (not baking), and a bar of laundry Soap (we tried Zote despite the recommendations). Because we got the Zote which has scent in it we skipped having to buy essential oils for fragrance. We figured we would be making more in the future so we measured out the dry ingredients and just put them in zip lock baggies for future use.

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The basics: you take a cheese grater and grate the Zote into boiling water. We recommend 8 cups of water to efficiently dissolve the grated bar.

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Once the water is pink and the bar is completely dissolved then you can dump the mix in you 5 gallon pail and add the dry ingredients. The recipe calls for the batch to then be filled the rest of the way to make a total of 2.5 gallons so the bucket is only half full. We’re the recipes really varied were just how much to dilute the mix. One called for the mix to be split into 10 gallons. That just seemed too diluted so we just filled the bucket to make it an even 5 gallons. It’s really soapy and even looks like laundry soap! It solidified after it cooled so you have to stir it up.

The finished project, jelly detergent.

The finished project, jelly detergent.

We did the cost calculations and it’s 5¢ a load. The ingredients total is only $2.09 per batch. That’s 5 gallons at about 50 loads a gallon. Now tell me you aren’t considering doing this now… It took us about an hour with the first time trial and error so it will only take half the time for the next batch. We ran two loads with it and it works great! It’s not super sudsy but the whites came out white and everything feels super clean to me!

I posted from my phone… Hopefully I didn’t butcher the English language.

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