Making Your Own Laundry Soap

I've developed a new obsession: soap. I have a few friends that come over on Tuesdays. We let the kids run wild and we make soap while we chat about life and love.

But I'm not going to cover that today.

Lets start easy on you and show you how to make your own laundry soap. This is an INCREDIBLE way to save some money. Here's what you need:



I spent: $3.39 for Borax, $2.49 for Super Washing Soda and $1.19 for Fels Naptha soap. More on that as we progress...

So the first thing I did was grate the soap and add it to 8 cups of water and heated it:



While that was heating I put 3 gallons of hot tap water into each of two five gallon buckets...so 6 gallons of water between two buckets. I did this because I doubled the recipe...I'm still not quite sure WHY I doubled the recipe, but I did...so lets just go with it. OK? OK.

To the three gallons of hot water, I added one cup of washing soda...and stirred it up to disolve it. Since I doubled, I did it twice. Here's what my buckets looked like. The one on the right has some suds because the residue from my last batch was still in there:



To the soap and water mixture on the stove, I added two cups of Borax and stirred. The mixture got slightly thick. Then, I poured off four cups of the Borax/Soap/Water mixture and added four cups to each five gallon bucket and stirred.



That is what it looked like when I finished. Now, because I love, love, love the smell of Tide White Lilac with Baking Soda, I poured about 4 cap fulls into each bucket so I could capture all that yummy smelly-ness in my home made laundry soap...but that step is completely optional. I'm sure this step probably more than doubles the cost of my laundry soap per load, but lets get back to that and see how much my nicely scented soap is really costing me per load:

I spent right around $7 for supplies. Of that, I only used 2 cups each of the Soda and the Borax. Now, just for arguments sake, lets say there is six cups in each the Soda and the Borax boxes, so each 2 cups costs me .57 for the Borax and .42 for the Soda. The Fels Naptha costs $1.19 and I used the whole bar for a double batch. So total, I spent $2.18 to make just over 8 gallons of laundry soap. That translates to approximatly 128 cups of laundry soap. If you divide the $2.18 out over 128 cups, that translates to just under .02 per load...if you use a whole cup instead of the half cup you could probably get by with.

NOW. I spent $3.99 on my Tide using coupons and a sale, and just to make it easy, lets say I used the whole thing in there, ( I didn't) which makes the whole batch cost $6.17. Without adding any additional cups of volume created by adding the detergent, this would mean each load would cost .05. To contrast, the same $3.99 I spent on the Tide, if used alone, would wash 26 loads, which translates to about .15 per load! And remember, I used coupons! If I didn't use coupons and was just lucky enough to find it on sale, it would cost $4.99 which translates to approximately .19 per load!

The whole thing took me about 15 minutes and now I have enough soap to last until the second coming...or until we go camping...all for right around $6. Does it work? You bet. Even the nasty smelly laundry comes out fresh and clean and everything looks at least as good as it did using the commercial stuff at full strength. Give it a try! You'll feel so proud of yourself for being super duper thrifty!

Here's the original recipe:
1 cup Borax
1 Cup Super Washing Soda
1/2 bar Fels Naptha Laundry Bar or 1 bar Ivory soap

Grate soap and add to 4 cups of water you've heated on the stove. Add three gallons of hot tap water to a five gallon bucket. Dissolve 1 cup of Super Washing Soda in the 3 gallons hot tap water. After soap has melted in hot water on stove, add 1 cup Borax and stir to dissolve. Mixture will get thick. Pour thickened Borax/Soap mixture into the soda water and mix to combine. Add whatever fragrance you'd like...or don't. You are supposed to let the finished product sit for 24 hours after mixing...it will thicken some and be more gel like in appearance. I pour mine into my old detergent bottles for easy dispensing.