Soap Overload!!!

You would think that with only two of us, we would hardly have any laundry to do...but it seems that there is a never-ending supply. God help us whenever we have kids!

Thankfully my wonderful hubby does most of it. I usually fold and put most of it away or fold it and leave a nice supply of clean clothes on our table :D

Well, I've gotten sick of paying so much for laundry detergent. I've read several blog posts about making your own laundry soap and decided to try it. The final recipe is from a combination of the different recipes I read.

What you need:

1 cup of Washing Soda (Not baking soda)
1 cup of Borax
1 bar of Fels-Naptha Soap
a 5-gallon bucket
LOTS of Water

1. Grate up the bar of Fels-Naptha soap add to a pot with 6 cups of water.
2. Cook on Medium-Low until the soap melts (don't let it boil).
3. Add 1 cup of Washing Soda and 1 cup of Borax and stir.
4. Cook on Medium-Low for another 10 minutes or so (a couple of the recipes said to cook until it got thick -honey consistency- but mine never did and I lost patience, besides many recipes didn't mention it getting thick)
5. Add a gallon of HOT water to your bucket and carefully pour in your soap mixture, stir to combine.
6. Add hot water to your bucket until it is almost full (leave a little space so you don't spill).
7. Cover and let sit over-night or until cool. It will separate into a gel on top and liquid on the bottom.
8. Once cool you can either use an immersion blender to mix it all up....or use your hands like me :) just smush up the gel and mix it with the liquid as much as you can.
9. Take a clean laundry detergent container (or other container of your choosing) and fill it Half-full with your soap mixture, add water to fill up the remainder of the container, close and shake!
10. Shake container before each use and use 1/4 to 1/2 cup in your washing machine. I checked several places and found that this is safe for front loading washers.

So if you paid attention you've realized that this ultimately makes 10 GALLONS of laundry detergent!!!!!! We have been using it for a couple weeks now and are Extremely happy with it, it seems to work as good if not better than our previous name-brand detergent! WooHoo!!!

Now for the cost:
I got all of the ingredients (minus the bucket which we had and water) in the laundry aisle at Walmart:
Borax (box with enough for several batches) less than $3
Washing Soda (box with enough for several batches) less than $3
Fels-Naptha soap (1 bar) less than $1

Total is less than $7 for 10 gallons of laundry soap!!!

Okay, so back to the soap overload :) This is so cheap and makes 10 gallons of soap, even with our never-ending laundry supply it would take a lot of time to go through, so if you want to try it or have run out of laundry soap or whatever and live close....bring me a clean container and we will fill it half-way with soap (other half needs to be water) and you can try it out and help lighten our supply! I want to keep enough for a couple bottles, but that still leaves several gallons to give away.

Just so you know, the clothes come out smelling clean but no other scent, if you want a scent you can just add a bit of essential oil in your scent of choice to the soap container.