Homemade Laundry Detergent

I wasn't discouraged by my failures at fabric softener, so I decided to make laundry detergent. After reading several recipes (Wellness Mama, Happy Money Saver, and Nature's Nurture), I decided to use this amalgam.

4 cups hot water
1/2 cup grated soap
1 cup washing soda
3/4 cup borax
1/2 cup oxyclean (powdered sodium percarbonate)
1/4 cup baking soda
1/2 cup scented laundry detergent, or many drops of essential oils

Add hot water and grated soap to a large bowl. Stir until well mixed, heating in the microwave if that helps the soap go into solution. Stir in washing soda and borax. Stir in oxyclean and baking soda. If you want scent, mix in a scented laundry detergent or essential oils. Let cool in the bowl for 24 hours. Stir again, and transfer to a lidded bucket that looks to be about twice as large as needed. Place lid on bucket until you're ready to scoop thick goop into your washing machine!

I usually use the drink mixer attachment on my immersion blender to mix this, but anything from a spoon with plenty of elbow grease to a mixer should work. If it's too thick for your chosen mixing approach, add more water to make it tractable - but then you'll need to add more detergent to your laundry. I use a 2 Tbs scoop for my washer.

I found already-grated soap in the laundry section, so that was easy. For the scented laundry detergent, I used Gain, what my mom always used. My laundry "smells like home" although now full-strength Gain just smells too perfumed to me!

My advice on this recipe is to store it in a bucket about twice as big as you expect to need. After it cools for 24 hours, I would expect changes to be done, but this recipe waits a couple days and then really expands. It also gets very thick (I suppose you could use more water, but then you need an even larger storage vessel), so scooping it out from a bucket on this second batch is so much easier than trying to shake it out of the old laundry detergent bottle on that first batch! I don't recall this much expansion from my initial small trial batch made with essential oils instead of Gain, so that may be the difference. So: use a bucket with room for expansion. I didn't expect that much expansion, nor did I expect it to expand a few days after the 24-hour cooling period, so I did have some pressurized laundry soap shooting around my laundry nook. Luckily that was easy to clean in my case (and much of it was contained in the basin that the bottle was sitting in), but I don't want anyone else making this unaware of the delayed expansion. Yay, bucket!

But: does it work? Unfortunately, I can answer that; luckily, to the positive. One of my children had a sudden onset of digestive upset. We changed his clothes in the bathtub, and I shook what bits I could into the toilet. I was pretty sure his clothes were stained, but after rinsing, I put his clothes in the washer. All I had was my homemade laundry detergent, so it was time for the worst-case test. After washing, and again after drying, I could detect no smell and no sight of what had happened. I was very impressed! His clothes were so nasty going in (and I scrubbed the bathroom after cleaning him up), I had already written them off. And, surprise! All clean!