Make your own Laundry Soap

This is another one of those things that nobody really thinks of making themselves. You get it at the store, right? It comes in all kinds of scents and sizes. Many people love how a particular brand of detergent smells and just can't imagine using anything else. And that's fine! If you have something you really love, then don't change it!

Personally, I can't stand any of the commercial detergents. They all smell too strong to me and the lingering scent on my clothes gives me a headache. Many of them also cause me to break out which seems to defeat the purpose of using a soap to clean something in the first place! I tried an all natural eco detergent for awhile, but that didn't really seem to get my clothes clean. I noticed a not-so-fresh scent on my clothing after a month or so with that detergent. Again, that seems to defeat the purpose of using a soap to clean something! So I started using an expensive hypo-allergenic detergent which worked just fine and I stopped thinking about it.

Then one day I read this article from The Simple Dollar about laundry detergent. Wait a minute. You can make your own laundry soap? I was intrigued, but it seemed pretty messy. And, in all honesty, saving a few bucks wasn't enough of a motive for me to start making my own detergent. The idea stayed in the back of my mind though.

About a week later, some ladies in the knitting group I belong to started talking about making their own laundry soap and how a lot of their skin problems went away once they stopped using the commercial stuff. Now that got my attention! My skin is very sensitive to a lot of chemicals and it was pretty much always red and irritated. I was used to it, but that didn't mean I wanted it to stay that way! Maybe this would make a difference?

Everyone seems to have different recipes for their own homemade laundry soap and their own favorite bars of soap to add to the mix, but they all used the same basic ingredients - Super Washing Soda, Borax, and a bar of soap. That's it! I decided to follow this one:

1 cup Super Washing Soda

1 cup Borax

1 cup grated soap

Put in a container and shake it until it is mixed. Use 2 tablespoons per load in the wash. If you want to soften your clothes, add a cup of white vinegar to the wash during the rinse cycle.

Well, that seemed very easy! I had never heard of washing soda or borax though and I wanted to find out what they were made of before using them in my wash. I was trying to get away from weird chemicals, not add more of them!

It turns out that washing soda is a salt called sodium carbonate. It is supposed to be very good at getting out stains and for helping clothes get cleaner in hard water. It is also used by dyers to help set their colors. Ok. This didn't seem so bad.

Borax comes from a mineral that is often found in seasonal lake beds. It has a ton of uses! For laundry, however, it is basically the same as washing soda - gets out stains and makes hard water softer. That didn't seem so bad either, so I was ready to try this out.

You can buy the ingredients at Amazon, but I found Super Washing Soda and Borax in the laundry section of the grocery store for a MUCH cheaper price. I spent about $5 for both boxes and another $1 for a bar of simple, unscented soap. That's about what I was spending each month for a bottle of the hypo-allergenic detergent I had been using! And I knew that for at least the next few months, I would only have to purchase the bar of soap to make another batch. In reality though, it has been much, much longer. I am still going through that box of Borax and it was purchased more than a year ago. That's pretty economical!

Mixing it up was fairly easy. I grated the bar of soap over a bowl and then put it in the container with the cup of washing soda and the borax. Then I shook it up and went to do some laundry!

Wow! I was so impressed by how well this stuff worked! My clothes were clean and the colors were brighter! It even got out all of the chocolate that was in my work clothes. I was completely sold. The real test, however, would come when I wore the newly cleaned clothing.

I was still a little leery about using these compounds for my wash. Sure, they cleaned my clothes better than anything I have used in years, but how would my skin react to them? In all honesty, I expected some sort of reaction simply because there always is one - it would just vary in intensity. So I started wearing the clothes. And... nothing happened. Absolutely nothing! I couldn't believe it!

I wish someone had told me about this sooner. It would have saved me a lot of money and grief over the years. My skin is no longer red and irritated. I don't itch all the time. I don't have nearly as many headaches. And my clothes are clean and bright! All it takes is a little time grating a bar of soap every couple of weeks and I get all of those benefits. Maybe you want to try it out yourself?