Cleaning Up

For a few weeks now, I have been contemplating the idea of DIY homemade laundry detergent.  I saw a post on Facebook and it looked nifty: a chance to save some cash and play with something homemade.   So when my husband mentioned this weekend that we were low on detergent, I saw my opportunity.  After poking around the internet for a bit I happened across a post at "How Does She?" with a recipe that looked pretty good.  It had the same three primary ingredients I'd found in all of the other online recipes, with a little extra thrown in.

This morning I took a trip to Wal-Mart and bought my ingredients.  This alone was kind of a big deal.  I almost never go to Wal-Mart.  I'm a Target (or Tar-jeh) girl, through and through.  However, Wal-Mart had all of the ingredients and Target didn't, so that settled it.  I didn't even burst into flames when walking through the door (though I did flinch a little).

What are these fabled ingredients, you ask?

• Borax: one box (4 lb, 12oz)
• Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda: one box (3 lb, 7 oz)
• Arm & Hammer Baking Soda: one box (4 lb)
• OxyClean: one container (3 lb) - optional but the recipe I found highly recommended it
• Zote Soap: two bars - I used the pink one since that was what Wal-Mart had.  Apparently you can also use Fels Naptha, and some people like Ivory soap but that's not a laundry soap so I'm not so sure...
• I also added a bit of Epsom Salts because various sites had commented that it made a great fabric softener.

I only wanted to make a half recipe, since this is a new project and I might end up hating it.  So I dumped half of all of the containers into a bowl, except the Epsom Salts as that was more like 1/4 of the container.  Then came the slightly tricky part - grating a bar of soap.  As recommended by various websites, I cut the bar into smaller pieces and microwaved them until they got puffy.

Once it cooled, I grated some of it, which worked nicely but took ages.  Tried to put the rest in the mini food processor.  This would have worked fine except that I did not let the soap cool enough first, so the cut pieces stuck together and made larger chunks.  I let them cool and reprocessed them, and for most of them it worked fine, but next time I would definitely either grate it all or let it cool (maybe refrigerate it if I were feeling impatient) before chucking them into the food processor.

And that's it!  You only need 2 tablespoons per load, and it's safe to use with HE washing machines and septic systems, so we should be fine.  Now we'll have to see if it works as well as everyone says it does....stay tuned!