Homemade Laundry Detergent

Ever since my mother started experimenting with recipes to make her own laundry detergent, I have been curious. A few weeks ago, I began to use one recipe (6 squirts of simple green + a scoop of washing soda) that I thought was easy and worked well, but I wanted to make this one, it seemed so much more *authentic*.


There are several recipes online, so you just have to pick one and go with it.


This one requires:

BORAX

WASHING SODA

& FELS NAPTHA

(made by Dial soap: Mom has found it at both Kroger & Publix)

The only 'labor' involved is grating the soap (Fels Naptha). A cheese grater works, the smaller the grate, the better.

Grate. Grate. Grate.

Once you have your bar of Fels Naptha grated, you are ready to mix...

...all three ingredients together:

The finished product:

When I got home I also added 1 cup of Oxyclean (although I use the Dollar Tree brand: LA's Totally Awesome Oxygen Base Cleaner) to my mixture (some of the online recipes add that as well). You can kind of make up your own mixture once you know the basic ingredients.

A link that has a basic recipe, but there are others like this one (which includes liquid detergent recipes as well), so browse around online if you want to know what people are using.

According to my very intelligent mother, the recipe I made ends up costing less than 5 cents a load!

Go ye therefore and be frugal!