homemade laundry detergent

well, you may have noticed that i was gone for another week.
i arrived home a couple of days ago, and immediately made myself a to-do list of things to accomplish by the weekend.
along with unpacking and putting everything back in its place, i had quite a few 'homemaking' tasks to do!

i love to do anything domestic. i love to spend time in the kitchen, and find ways to be more organic/green, as well as to cut down on costs and be as thrifty as possible.

i have been most excited to try and make my own cleaning products, beginning with one of the most used & most expensive products: laundry detergent!

we went with this recipe, on a new blog that i found, and i am really enjoying reading back through all of the past posts, and gaining even more ideas!!
there are so many recipes to make cost effective products that not only do the job well, but don't involve lots of chemicals that are bad for us, and for the environment.

you can find variations of this recipe online to make a liquid detergent, but i think the dry one was faster/easier to make, and i was able to use a clean, recycled sour cream container to store it in, instead of buying a big bucket.


Here is the recipe:
1 bar of shaved bar soap (Ivory, ZOTE, Fels-Naptha)
*we used a cheaper no-name brand*
1 cup of borax
1 cup of washing soda

-grate the bar soap using a fine grater
-mix ingredients together in a bowl until well blended
-store in a container with a lid
-voila! done! SO EASY!!

we doubled the recipe, and it made 1500 mL. (we stored it in a 1 kg sour cream container & a 500 mL one)
use 1 tbsp per laundry load, and we estimate that this will last 100 loads (and we have plenty of ingredients left over to make about 4+ more batches!)

we did our first load of laundry using this detergent and the verdict:
SUCCESS!!!

the clothes came out fresh, clean and we were so excited knowing that the 3 ingredients we bought will probably last 6-12 months.

YAY! what a thrill!! :)
(it's the small things in life, right?)