Homemade Laundry Detergent

When people ask me how they can start eating better, I usually tell them to focus on one thing at a time. Don't throw out every nasty thing in your pantry at once; pick one thing, work on it for two weeks, master it, then move on to another thing. Maybe you switch to wheat bread instead of white. Or brown rice instead of white. Then you focus on sugar. Then processed food, and so on.

This is the process we used, and it's the process I'm slowly using to get rid of chemical cleaners in our home, too. I'm already on the vinegar and water cleaning solution band wagon, and you know how big of a fan I am of the magical shower grime killer (see it here).

A year or so ago I decided I ought to look into making my own laundry detergent. That was right after I bought the mother lode (pun intended) of laundry detergent on sale at Walmart. So about 300 loads of laundry later, last week I was finally ready to take the plunge on making my own laundry soap!

I used The Wellness Mama's recipe, as it seemed simple and straight forward.

Here are the ingredients:

Borax: found at Walmart
Super Washing Soda: found...I can't remember where. I bought it a year ago after I knew I was going to make this. It sat faithfully in my laundry room until last week. It was kinda chunky due to age.
Castile Soap: found at Walmart. We've been using this castile soap for several months now. Drew has skin issues and I wanted some natural soap. Zach likes it so much he uses it as shampoo, too. It smells nice and lathers well, even without the sulfates that most contain to make lather.

First, I had to shred the soap. I started with the cheese grater, but as I was grating two bars, I decided to get out the big guns: the food processor.

The recipe says that the soap should be finely ground, so I brought out another attachment:

Then I mixed the following: 1 part soap (I had about 3 cups grated), 2 parts washing soda, 2 parts Borax, plus 2 tsp. of baking soda. Then I mixed thoroughly.

It made quite a bit of soap, and luckily I found some spare Mason jars to store the soap securely. I nearly filled up three jars.

The recipe says to use 1/8 to 1/4 cup per load, and an old scoop from our P90X Results & Recovery Formula measured a little more than 1/8 cup. Perfect!

So making the soap was very easy. Took maybe 30 or 40 minutes. (Clean up was relatively easy and struck me a bit odd..."cleaning" soap. Whatever!) But would it wash our (incredibly stinky) clothes?

Yes!

I'm so pleased with how this soap washes. It does not get all sudsy like regular soap, but the soap companies just put that stuff in to make you think the soap is working well...it's not really necessary. This soap made my clothes come out smelling like...Nothing! They didn't really have a smell, which is a good thing. It's kind of like when we installed our reverse osmosis water filtration on our sink and the water tasted truly like "nothing."

Lately our clothes had kind of a wonky soap buildup smell. Like maybe the detergent just wasn't ever rinsing out or something. No more! That smell is gone and replaced by pure nothing-ness. I'm very impressed!

Here's the official recipe if you'd like to make your own laundry soap:

Natural Laundry Soap Recipe
1. Grate the bar soap or mix in food processor until finely ground. Use the soap of your choice.

2.In a large bowl, mix 2 parts washing soda, 2 parts Borax and 1 part grated soap. (Add a few teaspoons of baking soda if desired).

3.Store in closed container. If you are using a big enough container, you can skip step 2 and just put all ingredients in storage container or jar and shake.

Use 1/8 to 1/4 cup per load of laundry.

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Workout of the Day

P90X3 Yoga, AKA the best yoga ever put on DVD.

Here's Zach doing "Ted's Chair" this morning. I'm amazed every time I see it!