Home-made Laundry Detergent - SO CHEAP!

While I'm not a fan of the show "19 Kids and Counting", I can totally get behind this!  As you can imagine they go through a ton of laundry, so in order to save money they make their own.  Mom made a batch after we got home from Vegas this summer (beginning of July), and we're not even halfway through the batch yet!  It's saved a TON of money, and works just as great as any store bought laundry detergent.

Since I know so many of us are on tight budgets, I wanted to share this, because I've been very impressed so far.  And double bonus, I've read that all 3 of the ingredients are safe to use for baby clothes, etc, so that's awesome :)

Ingredients:

-  One Fels Naptha Soap Bar, grated

-  One cup washing soda

-  1/2 cup Borax

Instructions:

Grate the soap bar into a small sauce pan.  Cover with hot water.  Cook over medium-low heat, stirring continually, until the soap completely dissolves.

Put washing soda and Borax into a 5 gallon bucket.  Pour in the hot, melted soap mixture.  Stir well, until all the powder is dissolved.  Fill the bucket to the top with more hot tap water.  Stir, cover securely, and let set overnight - it will congeal into somewhat of a gel when it sets.

At this point the original recipe tells you to mix equal amounts of soap concentrate and water in a smaller soap dispenser (like an old store-bought detergent container), and to shake it every time  you use it, and to use about 1 cup per load.  But what Mom did is leave it in the concentrated form inside the 5 gallon bucket, and we use about 1/2 of a cup of this per load.  What we use is a large plastic spoon inside the bucket and stir it before we use it, then use the spoon part as the measuring unit.  It works great!  Mom also added some scented essential oils, to give it a bit of a scent.  But if someone in your family has troubles with scents or anything, you can absolutely omit this step.

Here's what the final product looks like for us:

As you can see, we've got a little more than half left, and we've been using it for a family of 4-5 since July 2nd.  Since you only use one bar and a very minimal amount of each powder for one large bucket, it is *extremely* economical!  The instructions say that if you have a top loader machine, to use about 1 cup of the soap mixture (or 1/2 cup if you leave it concentrated in the bucket), and if you have a front loader machine to use 1/2 cup of soap mixture, or 1/4 cup of just the concentrated mixture in the bucket.  

One thing to remember if you do end up making this, is that it's not a sudsy soap, so don't be expecting that when you add it to your water :)  My Dad was adding more and more scoops at one point trying to get it to suds... fail! ;)  haha!

I highly recommend it though - it's saved us money for sure, and there have been no changes at all in the cleanliness of our clothes.  A win/win all around :)