Homemade Summer: Laundry Soap

There are many, many recipes to be found online for homemade laundry soap.  Many of them are for liquid soaps, in which I wasn't interested, even though, almost exclusively, I've used liquid detergents for my adult life.  The quantities were just so huge and I wanted to be sure we liked it before I made a huge batch.  So, I chose one of the powdered recipes that was comprised of four cups of this stuff:

That would be Borax (found at Target), Fels-Naptha soap (found at Ace Hardware), and washing soda.  (No, not baking soda, but rather washing soda.  I know.  I had never heard of it either before this endeavor.  Found at my local grocery.)  The recipe, from tipnut.com, is as follows:

2 cups Fels-Naptha, finely grated
1 cup Borax

1 cup washing soda

 Mix together, store in an airtight container.  Use two Tablespoons per load of laundry.

And by the way, two cups of the soap is roughly the same as two-thirds of a bar of the soap.  The hardest part of getting started with this was actually finding the materials.  Amelie helped me grate the soap for the first batch, using my old-almost-on-its-way-out, Pampered Chef grater.  It was simple.  I didn't really like the way the Fels-Naptha smelled when I first got it.  Thought it to be a bit overpowering.  However, grated up, into small bits and mixed with the others, it has a fabulous scent.  I do believe that my laundry has never smelled better!     

So far, I don't notice any differences in how our clothes are washing.  When I made it the second time, I doubled it.  And as far as the cost?  While I'm not one to figure out how cheap it actually is,

considering the materials cost less than $10 all together and are able to make many, many batches, it has to be cheaper than conventional laundry detergent.

So over here, in the midst of Homemade Summer, we're all about the homemade laundry soap.  

The homemade dishwasher detergent?  

Well, that's gonna need some tweaking.  

But, more about that another time.