Homemade Laundry Soap

Ahhhhh, finally!  The long awaited laundry soap post!

I have been wanting to try making my own laundry soap for years, but every recipe I found was really quite intimidating and I didn't want to have to try to mix up a 5 gallon bucket of the stuff and then have to store it.  Did you like that wonderful, long run on sentence I gave you there?  Anyway, it never occurred to me that I could cut the recipe down so I never tried.

Recently, in my money saving quest, I started looking for laundry soap recipes again.  Originally I found this one for a powdered soap.  I loved this recipe because it didn't require me to use a 5 gallon bucket and it didn't require mixing it using a stick mixer to try to blend it well.  I was planning to go ahead and make it when I found this recipe for liquid soap.  In reading the tutorial it mentioned that the powdered version is not good for cold water washing because it won't dissolve without heat.  Since I only wash in cold water, unless there are gross germy things involved, I figured I would have to go with a liquid version.  The recipe was for 2 gallons of soap and I thought I could surely cut the recipe in half and fill my 1 gallon  Hawaiian Punch container with some wonderful homemade laundry soap.

So here is what I did:

Ingredients:

1/2 bar soap- most people prefer Fels Naptha but I used Zote because it was cheaper
1/2 cup of Borax
1/2 cup washing soda
1/2 cup baking soda
water

Directions:

• Grate the bar soap into a medium sized cooking pot
• add 4 cups of hot water and bring the mixture to a slow boil, stirring frequently until the soap is dissolved
• add the borax, washing soda, and baking soda stirring well until they have dissolved
• bring it back to a boil then remove from the heat
• let it cool slightly
• add water to gallon container until it is about half full
• slowly add the soap mixture
• add more water until it is a few inches from the top
• close the container and shake well

This mixture will thicken a lot and that is OK.  Use 1/2 cup of the mixture per load of laundry.  I attached a 1/2 cup measure to the bottle using a metal ring that opens easily so it will not become lost.

So far I have been very impressed by the cleaning power of the laundry soap and it does a great job of stain removal on its own.

It cost me about $9 to purchase the ingredients to make the soap and I have enough to make many, many more batches.