Homemade Laundry Detergent

For anyone that wants to save money, have clean clothes,, and have a little fun (I think its fun,,maybe I'm weird :)) here is the recipe that I used homemade laundry soap!

Powdered laundry detergent
*1 cup Borax
*1 cup Washing Soda(not baking soda)
*1 bar Fels Napa soap
*1/2 cup oxi-clean(I used generic)

You have to grate up the bar soap into as little pieces as possible. I cut it up into chunks then ran it through my off brand magic bullet(I couldn't put it all in there at once,, do a couple rounds). You can just use the smallest holes on a grater or if you have a food processor that would be even better, but I don't have one. Then you just mix everything all together really well. I stored this in a recycled quart sized yogurt container(make sure you label it). You use 1-2Tablespoons per load(since my water is kinda hard I use 2T. I know that seems like a really small amount but trust me its all you need. Upon reading others adventures in using their homemade soap I read that some people have trouble with the soap dissolving but that's normally just if you don't get your bar soap grated well enough, but just to be safe I run a little hot water first and swish it around with the soap then turn it to warm. Then add your clothes and let it be. This soap does not suds up! That was hard for me to grasp at first, but I guess the manufactures just add ingredients to it to make it suds so we think its working. You don't need the suds,, it still cleans just fine. The other thing you will have to get used to is there wont be any perfumed smell on your clothes like were used to,, just clean fresh clothes. I thought it would bother me but it doesn't, especially knowing that this is not going to irritate my kids sensitive skin.

So there you have it. I am very happy with this so far. If you look around online you will find recipes for liquid det., but it makes a ton and you have to store it in a 5gal. bucket and I didn't want to mess with that. There are some variations to the recipe, but so far this one is easy and working for me! A lot of people have the cost breakdown for this too,,, its super cheap comaired to store bought!