Homemade Laundry Soap Still Seem Too Difficult? Here's an Even Easier Recipe.

I've been making my own homemade laundry soap for about a year now, and I swear by it. It's cheap.  It's easy .  It smells good.  And it works!
(And I found a way to make it a little easier, too.)

But I must confess, sometimes I'm not super patient when I boil my felsnaptha and it gets clumpy.  Sometimes I forget about it and I burn it.  Sometimes I get lazy and don't even cook it at all; I just throw it in the bucket with the other ingredients and stir.  And it still works, but it doesn't set up quite right, and it looks weird, and it's messy, and blah blah blah.

As far as homemaking goes, I'm not exactly what you'd call an overachiever.  I'm only super motivated when it comes to looking for easier, faster, and cheaper ways to do things.  And today I've found one.  Even though my old recipe for laundry soap was super easy (it really is, I'm just really THAT lazy), I found one that's even easier.

These recipe amounts are for one gallon, but you can make multiple gallons at a time.
3 Tablespoons Borax
3 Tablespoons Washing Soda
2 Tablespoons Dawn Ultra Dishwashing Liquid

I happen to be using an old milk jug for mine.  Usually milk jugs shouldn't be reused for much of anything, but since it's just soap, and I plan to use it all in one week, I'm thinking it should be fine.  One gallon makes 16 loads, so essentially that's one week's worth of laundry detergent for my family.  So making one jug at the beginning of each week works for me.  If you want to make more than that at the same time, you could easily line up your one gallon jugs (old juice bottles work too) or buckets or whatever, and then add the ingredients assembly-line style.  You can use a small plastic funnel for this and it helps to make it all go much faster and with much fewer spills.

Once all  jugs have the 3 ingredients inside, pour 4 cups of VERY HOT water into each one.  Swirl each bottle until all the ingredients are dissolved in the liquid.  Then fill almost to the top with cold water.  Supposedly it's okay if a lot of bubbles spill out.

Then it's just one cup per load, easy to pour, and safe for HE washers too!  I must confess, it looks almost like pure water when you pour it in the machine.  I was totally skeptical that it would get anything clean at all.  And as far as getting dirt and stains out, I'm not sure yet if it passes the test (I haven't tried it on any super dirty clothes yet).  But it definately passes the "sniff" test.  I washed a load of my boys' underwear in this stuff and they came out smelling like... well, NOT like boys underwear.  What more could you ask for?

So what do you think?  What's your favorite DIY laundry soap?  We'd love to hear your suggestions.


Marcia


This great idea comes to us courtesy of OneGoodThingByJillee