Friday, April 19, 2013

Where I started: Laundry Detergent

  Today on my kitchen counter you'll find the makings for homemade laundry detergent.  This is where my journey of "What can I make myself" began.  I was tired of spending $10-$15 (it's been so long I really don't even remember how much exactly) a pop on bottles of laundry detergent!  Plus I was buying the dye free, fragrance free variety & I was paying more to get the companies to leave stuff out!  HELLO?! I had heard that you could make your own laundry detergent, but that sounded a little radicle to me.  (Says the woman who mow makes her own soap!)  I finally got fed up & did an Internet search only to find that it didn't look radical at all, but really simple!  Three ingredients were ALL that were needed and they were CHEAP!

  There are tons of recipes out there, and you have to find the one that you like, but here is my favorite.
Ingredients
--1/3 Bar Fels Naptha Soap grated 
(A food processor attachment is great for this step!)
--1/2 Cup Washing Soda 
(This is different than baking soda!)
--1/2 cup Mule Tem Borax
All of the above ingredients can usually be found in the laundry aisle.  I find all of them at my local supermarket (Publix) and at Walmart, but I have yet to find the soap at Target.



The process
-- Combine soap & 6c water in saucepan & heat until the soap melts
-- Add washing soda & borax & stir until it is dissolved.
--Remove from heat
-- Pour 4c HOT water into 2 gallon bucket 
(In the winter I heat this water in the microwave, but the rest of the year I just use the hot from the tap.  I have a solar hot water heater, it's plenty hot most of the year!)
--Add soap mixture & stir
---Add one gallon plus 6c cold water & stir.

I don't take credit for this recipe I found it here:


But I have made a couple of tweaks to it:

-- I use scraps from my own homemade soap now, so I use 1c of grated soap instead of the 1/3 bar


 --When I started ordering fragrance oils for my homemade soap, I began adding 1/2 ounce of fragrance to my laundry detergent.

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