Hello again friends! It’s been a long summer of travel with teens to conventions, camps and more. It has been a blast but I am so ready for fall now! I love the schedule that school brings, being home with my 3 kiddos is my dream come true. Our homeschool begins this Monday so I’ve spent the last week prepping our school room and home for the up coming year.
Part of this prep was making our laundry soap for the next 6 months. We were running pretty low and it needed to be done. I can’t complain since I only have to do it twice a year! Plus it is really fun, only takes about 20 minutes, and best part… saves us around $120 a year in other store bought laundry soap!
First of all let me tell you about my many fails at DIY laundry soap! My original attempt was to make the liquid kind where you grate the soap and then boil it with water into a liquid soap (with other stuff too). Well I put in the hours and made a ton of it. We used it for a year. After about 6 months I could see a change in our clothing. Not a good change… our clothes were dingy, losing color and wearing out at an accelerated rate. I thought it was my imagination, but after a year there was no denying it was ruining our clothes. Since it was an attempt to save our family money this was an unacceptable result. We never made it again.
A year or so later I came across a new recipe for a powdered laundry detergent that didn’t ruin clothes. I gave it a try. Just making this DIY laundry powder was a workout! The grating alone reminded me of why I didn’t enjoy this process at all. Still I made it and it worked great! 6 months no change in our clothing’s appearance or integrity of the fabric. Wonderful news until I needed to make a new batch… ugh the grating again. I will admit I bought a jug of Tide to “tide us over” until I felt like spending an hour grating soap again.
Then I found this (cue angels singing in my head):
WHAT?!?! No more grating?!?! SOLD!!! I’ve been using this almost a year now and clothes are doing great, we are saving money, and absolutely no grating! Just mix it all up 🙂
Ingredients:
1 Box Borax
1 box Arm and Hammer Laundry Booster
2 bottles Downey Unstopables (or a different scent booster you love)
2 boxes Zote Soap (pre-grated)
2 small containers oxy-clean
1 box baking soda
Mix it all up and put it in a cute container (mine is a huge glass jar from Walmart for $7)! I use a trash bag to mix mine up 🙂 it’s hard to stir in the actual jar I use. Here it is all ready to go! I use a 1/2 cup scoop but usually only need to fill it halfway per load. If it’s my son’s t-ball clothes or we did something particularly messy I add a full scoop.
Well that’s all for now, thanks for stopping by 🙂
Johanna
My Crazy Blessed Life! 