I thought I had posted this, but if I did I can’t find it. Since I made another batch today, I guess it’s as good a time as any.
I make my own laundry soap because I like to. Yes, it helps that it’s cheap, but if you like the smell of Ivory soap, you’ll love just doing this. The whole house smells of the stuff for days.
This kind of went hand-in-hand with using vinegar instead of fabric softener. My towels, especially, were always stinky as soon as they got wet. Since the rest of my stuff usually doesn’t get wet, it got me to thinking that it was probably not clean, and nasty, too, I just didn’t know it. I don’t know if it’s the water or the humidity — good for your hair and your skin, bad for everything else — but my things aren’t stinky anymore. So — cheap and not stinky. What more could you ask for?
And it’s easy. Yeah, it’s a little messy, but only because I am. Someone else could probably make up a batch of this stuff and even Martha Stewart wouldn’t be able to tell. But at my house, everyone knows because of the mess I make.
I use my food processor for this. Since I realized I pretty much never use it for anything else anymore — graters and knives are less work and easier to clean — the food processor is now dedicated to this, so we don’t bother cleaning it anymore. It is a pain to clean the soap out of it. So get a cheapie at a garage sale and save yourself that chore.
3-4.5 oz. bars of Ivory soap
2 cups of borax
2 cups of washing soda
Grate the soap, mix in the borax and washing soda, run it through the food processor and that’s it. It makes about eight cups of laundry soap — this lasts us about a month or so, depending on how much laundry I do. Following the Fly Lady schedule, I do about a load a day, but sometimes more, like when we wash the quilts and towels and stuff.
Be sure you’re getting washing soda. You aren’t looking for baking soda — that’s different stuff. My Wal-Mart has the borax, but, sneaky as they are, they have a big box of baking soda next to it, not washing soda, and they did trick me once. So I do have to go to a different store to get the washing soda, which is also Arm & Hammer, by the way, but that’s no big deal.
I have a 1/8-cup measure that we used for coffee. A scoop of that per load — a heaping scoop if it’s really dirty stuff — and that’s it. Really nasty stuff also gets a cup of ammonia — especially the whites — instead of bleach. We have a lot of clay or iron or something in the water. Don’t know what it is, but it turns everything this lovely shade of brown — looks kind of like the road outside. The ammonia helps with this, but the bleach didn’t. So I don’t use much bleach anymore.
There ya go.
