I Made Laundry Detergent

The other day, I was in the grocery store buying echinacea tea and lozenges and a flame thrower to try to dislodge the sore throat from Hell that was threatening my Thanksgiving when I ran into a former student.  I had actually taken her little girl's pictures a few months earlier and we chatted for a while.  Upon learning my intended purchases, she laughed and said that she was there buying ingredients for homemade laundry soap.  How fun!  The only two hippies in Dingleberry hanging out in the grocery store.  (Well, three...her husband was there.)  She touted her recipe's cleaning power and showed off the softness of her clothing and then I staggered away to find vitamin C drops and forgot all about the homemade laundry soap.

Until my beloved Tocaya mentioned it on Facebook.  Or Pinterest.  Or possibly Google+.  Or all of them.  (GAH.  Social media is hard.)  I said, "Really, girl?"   And she said, "Honey, yes..." And I said, "I don't know..." And she said, "Oh, you've gotta try it."  And I said, "Okay."

I clicked on the recipe link she provided (here 'tis)  and found myself staring at a fairly simple list:  Fels Naptha soap, borax, baking and washing soda, and one of those oxygen-based stain remover powder thingies.  Easy peasy.  I found all of the ingredients in Kroger (I had to do a little searching for the Fels Naptha) and spent about fifteen dollars on it.

Back home, I followed the instructions as best I could (see below) and in about fifteen minutes, I was ready to wash my first load of clothes.  The results were...good.  I can't say that my clothes were CLEANER than they were with "regular" soap, but they were certainly AS clean.  I definitely didn't waste fifteen dollars on supplies, which is good, because I have a metric ass-ton of laundry detergent right now.

You want me to break it down, list style?  (Awwwww, yeah...)  (Are you picturing me as Barry White, cruising around my laundry room?)  (Please don't.  That's just weird.)

1. This detergent is NOT green.  I mean, it's white in color, but it also contains petroleum products and some chemicals.  I try really hard to be as green as possible, but the truth is that, much like my beloved Curel, I'm okay with my laundry detergent containing a few chemicals.  In the case of the detergent, the bad stuff is spread out by a looooooot of "natural" products, so, you know...yay.  The purpose of this experiment was NOT to be greener than the average bear, but to be cheaper than the average bear.  
2. Of course, bears are probably harder to be greener or cheaper than, given that they live out in the woods, eat what they forage, and avoid using petroleum products.  Unless they eat a PERSON.  (Did I tell you somebody saw a bear a few miles away from here?  Yeah.)
3. Fels Naptha soap is STRONG.  It apparently used to have some chemical in it that caused cancer and made people sick and, I don't know, acted as a homing signal for aliens, but now that chemical is gone.  It still smells strong and the package warns that you should avoid prolonged skin contact with it.  If you have a food processor, grate it in there.  It takes about five minutes and then you're done.  
4. All of the powders (the borax, the sodas, and the oxy-clean stuff) have a tendency to cloud up when you pour them.  The original poster talked about how mixing the detergent made your house smell great, but she failed to mention that mixing it also had the potential to coat you with a white film that tastes fairly awful and probably isn't good to ingest or inhale.  (This is NOT a reason not to make this stuff.  Just because something is "natural" doesn't mean you should eat it or breathe it.  Allow me to introduce you to castor beans and methane gas.)  I mixed mine outside on the patio.
5. The original poster suggested mixing the detergent in a plastic bag-lined five gallon bucket with a lid, which I of course didn't have.  I did, however, have one of those enamel-coated canning pots with a lid, which worked just fine.  Mixing the stuff was challenging.  I did put it in a plastic bag inside the pot, but it was a CHEAP plastic bag and one of the corners burst and I cussed and spilled some of the powder onto the floor and then I slipped in it and I cussed some more.  Maybe if your plastic bags aren't bootleg, they work better for mixing, but I gave up and dumped it all in the pot to mix.  I put the grated soap in first, which was a mistake.  Next time, I'll probably mix the powders together first and then add the soap in little by little, because I'm still not sure that it's all the way mixed up. 
6. This makes a loooot of detergent.  Like, this much.
   
   
   
7. I know this doesn't seem like a lot, until you look at this picture, which is the size of the scoop you're supposed to use (for what it's worth, I use a heaping scoop every time):
   
   
   
    This stuff is going to last forever....
8. Although highly scented in the container, this soap is NOT highly scented on the clothes.  You can smell it a bit when you put them in the dryer, but when they come out...no.  Mine smell faintly of the compostable lemongrass-scented dryer sheets I use, but otherwise, they just smell like...cloth.  Not dirty, but definitely not store-bought highly scented.  This is fine by me, as I have gotten to the point where I think it's weird that you can smell folks' laundry detergent months after they washed their clothes.  (I got some handmedowns from a friend who uses a different brand than me and after almost a year in storage, they still smell like Gain.  Not that Gain smells BAD, but what does that mean, you know?)  I worry that it will freak Will out, because he equates "chemical smell" with "clean."  You should see the array of bottles he bought to clean the bathroom he uses.  It makes me sneeze just to think about it.  I've scouted around online and found that folks have added scent crystals to their mix or just use highly scented dryer sheets or those dryer bars.  Until the Chemical Brother complains, I'm going to avoid this.
9. My clothes are clean.  I want to stress this.  They don't seem dingy, the whites are whites, and the brights are brights.  I can't imagine, given that it took such a short amount of time, why every single person I know isn't doing this.  (To be fair, I have used this only on hot and warm water; I rarely wash stuff in cold, because my kids are germ magnets and they are frequently covered in gross mess.)  
10. This detergent is going to last me a loooong time.  Given that I spend around fifteen dollars a MONTH on detergent and stain remover booster stuff, I figure I'll save (at the least) ninety bucks over the course of six months, which is pretty cool.  Every bit I DON'T spend on chemical-laden, expensive cleaning products can go to organic veggies, fruit, and pop tarts.  Or organic flour with which to make organic pop tarts with my organic frickin' fruit, yo!  (Once you start this stuff, it's like a drug.  YOU NEED YOUR FIX.)

Yeah, so I did it.  It took fifteen bucks and fifteen minutes.  You can totally do this.