Homemade Laundry Soap

This is really a bit of an erroneous title that I attribute to the pin I found on Pinterest. Really, all I'm doing is combining various washing aids into a mixture that is used to wash clothes. The reason I gave it a try is that the combined cost of these ingredients was about equal to a big bottle of Tide, but will last a lot, lot longer because so little of it is needed for each load. Here are the ingredients I used:

A box of baking soda, a box of Super Washing Soda, a box of Borax, and three bars of Fels-Naptha soap.

The Fels-Naptha bars are pretty solid and a bit hard to cut or grate. So I popped them in the microwave for a short time - just enough to soften them a little, but not enough to make them start losing their bar shape.

When the soap had softened, I chunked it into a manageable size

then grated a few chunks at a time in my food processor. That worked OK. But during the clean-up of my tools, the soap didn't want to easily release itself from the blade. Next time I make the mixture I think I'll grate the soap by hand with a cheese grater. It may take longer, but I think I'll like the texture of the soap better as strips of soap rather than little pea-sized soap balls.

Next I poured all the ingredients into a plastic container that has a tight-fitting lid. You might consider doing this outside as all those powders tend to fly up in the air and you'll end up breathing them in. It was a rainy day, so I mixed them in the kitchen, just trying to be careful.

In the instructions I was following, two optional ingredients are mentioned. The first is a bucket of OxyClean. Since I don't like to use that on all my clothes, I left that out. I simply add OxyClean to the loads that need the extra boost. The other optional ingredient is a fragrance booster. Since I received a (very small) sample in the mail and liked the aroma, I added the little green pellets to the mix.

The proportion of fragrance booster to the soaps is obviously too small in the photo below. A couple weeks later I was able to find a store that carries the booster, so added in a full-size container.

It takes about 1.5 tablespoons of this mixture for a full load of laundry, so this bucket of soap should last a long, long time - especially since this is a household of two people. How do I like it? Well, these are my observations:

1. Though the container has a fairly tight cover, it's not aroma-proof. It's a fairly strong odor when I walk into the laundry room. It's not bad. Just strong.


2. It's a good idea to start the water in the washer and add the soap before putting the clothes in. That helps the Fels-Naptha dissolve. Grating the soap by hand would give less dense soap bits. My guess is that they would dissolve more easily than these pea-size bits.


3. This laundry mixture does not bubble and foam like the detergents I'm used to using. So you can see the clothes agitate, see a bunch of dirt being released from the clothes in the water, but never get the bubbles. That was disconcerting at first.


4. The clothes smell good coming out of the washer. Again, not that 'detergent' smell, but still a clean smell.


5. The only thing that didn't come out as clean as I'd hoped was a rag that had a greasy splotch on it. So for greasy stains, I'll use a pre-treatment with a stain-remover aid.

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