Making homemade laundry soap has been a bit of a passion of mine. I hated spending big bucks on the stuff at the store and with 3 kids you can imagine the laundry my family goes through. One pre-teen who seems to think laundry is done magically and my two youngest are special needs kids. My middle child is all about stains, meal time is often a challenge because of his lack in motor skills. At 7 he still struggles with using silverwear and often just uses his fingers when no one is looking (if he can) and then wipes his hands on his clothes. My youngest can't tolerate anything on her clothes. If she washes her hands and gets her shirt wet, then she needs to change clothes. It gets frustrating at times. Plus a husband who works in the farming industry even though he works for a grain elevator. The ground in dirt when he's doing some repairs to the dust beyond what should be legally allowed. LOL and the smells.... if he has to clean out a “boot” that has rotten grain in it. Well lets just say it would make me lose my lunch within minutes if I had to do that job. The smell is indescribable and disgusting.

Now that you know a little about my laundry needs you can see why I was searching for something that was a little more cost effective. Yet worked just as well. And as far as being “green”, it is great for the environment as well. So by making your own you can help green up our planet. Keep those plastic bottles of laundry detergent out of our landfills and you really don't need chemical detergents to clean your laundry.

Now I have searched the internet looking for different recipes. And have tried many of them. But in the end I decided to look outside the box and come up with my very own.

But before I continue all you need are the following basic ingredients:

BORAX : Found where other laundry supplies are found. Usually next to the bleach and color safe bleaches. Look for the green box of “twenty mule team borax”. Borax is used as a whitener and a deodorizer in your laundry. If your a smoker borax will even remove these odors and other nasty smells that you may find yourself dealing with.

WASHING SODA : Also found where laundry supplies are found. This is a yellow box of Arm & Hammer Washing Soda. Please do not confuse this with baking soda. They are two totally different products and can't be interchanged. Washing soda is used to remove the dirt and helps with removing the odors.

SOAP : Popular soaps used are the fels naptha soap which is hard to find and it can be found in the laundry isle. Or another option is a soap made with coconut oil and lard. Both these oils are highly recommended for using in a laundry soap. This is what I make for my own laundry needs. Other options are other handmade soaps either scented or unscented. If you must buy a bar where regular soaps are sold choose plain old fashioned ivory. This is the most like handmade soap of all the commercial soaps. Do not use a deodorant type bar or a beauty bar. They may smell nice but they don't work well for laundry soaps.

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First I will discuss the powdered version. While some may like it I see many down falls. First of all is the amount used. 1-2 tbs per load. To me this just isn't enough of the active ingredient to make it effective. If you stop and read both the boxes of borax and washing soda you will find that both boxes say to use ½ cup per load of laundry along with your regular detergent. And total that makes 1 cup if you use both. (Not including any soap.) And these handmade recipes call for 1-2 tablespoons of a mixture of the three ingredients. There is something wrong with those numbers.

The other big down fall with powdered laundry soaps is how it dissolves. Since more people are washing in cold water now days to be more environmentally friendly. If you use hot water for washing this isn't an issue for you but powdered laundry soap just does not dissolve in cold water, thus being not effective. How can it clean if it won't even dissolve into the water.

Borax requires boiling water to dissolve it. And if you dissolve it in a clear container you will know it's dissolved because the mixture will go from a milky white color to crystal clear.

But also the soap portion of the recipe will not dissolve in cold water and it will just float around. Even after letting the washer run for quite some time. When I went back the ingredients just didn't not dissolve into the cold water.

The one way I have found around this is to heat a container of water, dissolve the laundry soap into it and then pour it into the washer. But this method is both a pain and not very practical. Plus it's also a mess. Another method I found that does work is to set the water level to the lowest amount and fill with hot water. Pour in my laundry soap and agitate for a minute or two before adding the clothes and filling up the rest of the way in cold water.

The amount to use is still very questionable. But I do think that you need more than 1-2 tablespoons. I used between ½ cup and 1 cup of my powdered laundry soap.

This was not my favorite method because I found it to be a pain to make sure it was dissolved to be effective.

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Now on the the liquids and gels. I feel this is not very desirable because of the fact that it separates and it needs to be stirred or shaken before it can be used. I know I have better things to do than sit and stir or shake my laundry soap before it can be used. I've also seen it described in written words as “egg drop soup” and others call it slime or snot. I'm sure these are not terms that you would prefer to use with your laundry soap.

While I have made liquid laundry soap to be a complete and total gel, it's very touchy. I made it in large batches in a 5 gallon bucket several time and using the same recipe it didn't turn out as I wanted. Then using the same recipe made smaller in a smaller plastic container, it didn't turn out.

But now on to the fun part about handmade laundry soaps that most don't consider. As I said above, both the box of borax and washing soda say to use ½ cup along with your regular laundry detergent. Now on to a math lesson.

This is a common recipe.

1/3 bar fels naptha soap. This is 5.5 ounces so 1/3 bar would be a little over 1.75 ounces.

½ cup washing soda

½ cup borax

Total water amount = 32 cups of water

Now divide your 32 cups of water by your 1 cup of active ingredients not including the small amount of your soap.........

There are 16 tablespoons in a cup so that amounts to about 2 tbs of borax/washing soda per cup of your liquid laundry soap. Now these recipes tell you to use ¼ cup of the liquid/gel/glop mixture.

Now there are 3 teaspoons in a table spoon, so your 1 cup of liquid soap now has 6 teaspoons of active ingredients and you need ¼ cup which equals out to 1.5 teaspoons per ¼ cup of laudnry soap which is only a ½ tbs of active ingredient. The rest is just water.

Now are you still convinced that these recipes actually clean your clothes.

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Which is why I set out to make my own formulation, but I wanted to keep the water amount low. Yet I needed it to dissolve the soap and the borax. But the other big challenge was to keep it from separating.

And what I came up has the consistency of pudding more than anything.

The following photo's are taken of my own personal container of laundry soap that I use for my family. The container is one that has a tight fitting lid so it doesn't dry out and I bought it at wal-mart for about $4.99 I think. It measures 11” tall and 9” wide. The spoon is one from a dollar store and it has a long handle with a nice wide bowl part of the serving spoon. It's also a purdy color as well.

The recipe that I use is a lot different than anything else that is posted on the net.  But my mixture contains about 8 tbs (soap, borax and washing soda) per cup and I do use about a cup per load.

This isn't rocket science it's just laundry soap, but you need to look at the active ingredients used to get stains out and clean your clothing of the body odors and other dirt and other stuff that makes clothes dirty.

But you do need to make sure that whatever recipe you use has enough of the active ingredient to do their job.

I'm not posting my specific recipe and more importantly the technique that I came up with yet. Because I'm not sure what i'm going to do with it yet. Because it's the technique that I think makes the difference. And I'm very happy with my laundry pudding that I came up with.