Save big by making your own laundry soap....

I know, I usually post craft projects on my little ol blog, but I think making your own laundry soap can be crafty too. I'm sure a lot of you are looking for ways to save on anything we can these days so I thought I would share this little way I've found to save a lot on laundry costs.

The recipe I like to use to make my own laundry soap is a powder soap. I find this cleaner and easier to manage than the liquid version. I found a lot of funny stories on disasters with the liquid version.

The formula I used in my last batch was as follows: 1 bar Fels-Naptha soap (about 2c), 1c washing soda and 1 c Borax. Make sure to use washing soda as it is different that baking soda. You can add a little baking soda to your mix as a whitener if you want to as well.

The only effort on my part was in grating the soap. I used my little grater myself, but you can use a food processor for quicker results. You want the soap to be as fine as possible. I found that this only took about 5-10 minutes. Keep in mind that while you have everything out, you can do a couple of bars at a time and either store it or make a larger batch of laundry soap. Better yet, make one of the kids do it for you.

After you mix the ingredients in a big bowl, just put in an airtight container to store. I put mine in a little old canning jar.

For your laundry, you only need 2Tfor a large load. If you have an HE machine, just use 1T for a large load. It doesn't seem like that much but it works fine. Commercial detergents are full of fillers, perfumes, whitening agents and sudsing agents, all of which you don't need. Foaming and sudsing are ways to make it appear that the detergent is working and to make a small amount of cleaner go farther in the water that it's packaged in.

This is true soap and not detergent. Detergents are petroleum based (yes, as in gasoline) and a synthetic imitation of soap. Think of detergent as margarine compared to butter.

As far as the cost goes, it's only about $.03/load. Most detergent is about $.30 to .40/load, big difference. I paid $1.49 for the Fels-Naptha soap, $2.98 for the washing soda(Publix) and $2.99 for the Borax (Wal-Mart). Keep in mind there are dozens of uses for these products as well as laundry soap too.

There is a lot of information online about these individual products so I won't list much more. But, I got the seal of approval from my husband who happens to have an advanced degree in Chemistry and Biology that it's all good and very safe and good for the old planet to boot.

There are several ways to mix this recipe up too. If you want to make a vegan recipe, just exchange the Fels-Naptha with a vegetable oil based soap like castile soap. You can use other soaps instead of Fels-Naptha but you don't want one that has very much fragrance or it won't work as well. You can consider using Zote, Ivory or another soap that's a laundry soap would work best.

If you would like to try some other recipes or try the liquid version you can go to this list on Tipnut. This site has a lot of extra information too if you want to do some more research. And if you want to buy the ingredients on-line, a good source is Soaps Gone Buy. I bought my first batch of products from them and had a good experience. The site also has some recipes for household cleaners using the Borax and Washing Soda too. Even with the shipping cost, you will still save money.

And of course I can't leave out where I got this idea in the first place. You can get recipes from my favorite family....the Duggars right here.