I see a lot of posts about making your own laundry detergent. Unfortunately, most of these posts seem to be written by people who are making the detergent for the first time. Know that laundry detergent is a "chemical" process in that you are mixing different ingredients together like a recipe. Therefore, your liquid detergent is never going to be as clear and smooth as commercially made detergents that are full of chemicals. But your detergent will clean your clothes just great.
As a cost saving measure, I have been making my own laundry detergent for about four years.
1. Yes, you do save a lot of money!
2. I make my detergent about once every 3 months.
3. This is an unscented recipe. But if you want to add some scent, you can add a few drops of essential oils to each load of laundry. You can, of course, also add the commercial scents currently being sold in the laundry aisle (but that adds chemicals).
4. I like to do this after dinner while I am watching TV, then I leave the soap to gel overnight. In the morning, I mix it and dispense it into old detergent bottles.
Ingredients:
2 Bars of Ivory (1 if it is a big bar)
1/2 Bar of Laundry Soap
1/2 cup Liquid Castile (Or another 1/2 bar of Castile soap)
1 cup of Washing Soda
4 tbs Glycerin
4 tbs salt (canning salt recommended).
Herbs from Garden (Thyme, Mint)
Steps.
1. Make an herbal tea as your base. Optionally put 1 cup of chopped fresh herbs into your stockpot that you have filled 2/3rds full of water. Let this simmer for about an hour to create an herbal tea - then remove the herbs. You can either put the herbs in cheesecloth, a teabag, or just strain them out. I recommend only doing this if you actually grow herbs because if you buy the herbs at the store, then the detergent will be too expensive.
2. Put your grated soap into the hot tea water. Keep the burner on low until all the soap has dissolved.
3. After grated soap has dissolved, add all other ingredients. If you have soft water, reduce the salt to 2 tbs. If you have hard water, you may want to add an extra salt.
4. Allow the detergent to sit until it has gelled (become solid on top). You can just leave it over night.
5.
Blend the gelled detergent using a stick blender. Then dispense the detergent into old laundry detergent bottles (than have been cleaned). Fill the bottles but leave a few inches so that you can add water to the bottles that you use last because they will thicken up over time.
6.
Add 1 - 2 laundry cap-fuls of detergent per load (before loading clothes). You can add extra detergent for very dirty man clothes;-). The measure is approximately one third cup per load. You can also add your essential oil such as Sweet Orange.
7. To further boost cleaning, you can add 1/4 cup of additional washing soda per load. So for example, if your husband is a construction worker, he may have very dirty clothes. Be sure to start the cylce before you begin adding his clothes.
8. For very smelly clothes, for example if you have a teen athlete, you can also add 1/4 cup of vinegar to the rinse cycle.
You can also make body wash with this recipe by just leaving out the washing soda and adding more glycerin (and don't use laundry soap, use body soap - but you knew that).
