RECIPIES- CLEANING & STUFF

MAKE YOUR LAUNDRY SOAP

The recipe is so simple, it’s 3 ingredients. Bar soap, borax and washing soda (not baking soda). I prefer using a castile soap, you can use Dr Bronner’s, or my personal favorite right now, Kirk’s Castile Soap, of course you can use a bath soap like Ivory, just don’t use anything that has moisturizers or major additives, they may work for your skin, but they will not work well to clean clothes. You take the bar soap, grate it in a food processor, or you can do it by hand, you want to get it grated as fine as possible, I like to run the blade attachment on the soap after I grate it, just to make it finer, it dissolves better that way. Once you have the bar soap in powder form, measure it, you can just eyeball it if you want, it doesn’t have to be exact. Add an equal amount of borax and the same amount of washing soda. Measure by volume, not by weight. So, it’s one part powdered bar soap, one part borax and one part washing soda. Put everything in a container with a lid and mix it well, you might have to break up any lumps in the borax and washing soda.
I know a lot of people who use homemade laundry soap like to take it to the next step and make it into a liquid, some people just like using liquids better, they say the powder doesn’t dissolve well, I have not had that problem, I think it’s because I grate the bar soap so fine, that’s the part that will give you trouble dissolving, especially in cold water if you don’t get it fine enough. Since I go ahead and take the extra time to use the blade attachment of my food processor, the bar soap is pretty fine and it dissolves just fine for me. If you want to make this into a liquid, just do a search for homemade laundry soap, you’ll find lots of recipes that take the next step of making it into a liquid, I just prefer not to do it myself, it takes up much less space this way too.
You use 1-3 tablespoons of the mixture per wash load, no more, it will not seem like enough, especially if you are used to using commercial laundry detergent by the cup full, I like to use a coffee scoop, it is just right. This will not suds up in the water, if you feel like it’s not enough, or you have an especially dirty load of wash, then run it through another wash cycle with another 1-2 tablespoons of powder, adding more to the initial wash will not get things any cleaner, in fact, it will defeat the purpose as it may not rinse out well if you add too much.