Sunday, January 15, 2012

Liquid Laundry Detergent

What a busy day! As usual, our Saturday was full of things to do and not quite enough time to get it all done. One of the big things on the list today was attempting to make Liquid Laundry Soap. After much searching on Pinterest (love), I decided to go with the Duggar Recipe. I looked at a TON of blogs to figure out which recipe seemed to work best. Finally, I chose the Duggar recipe because well, they have 20 kids...I figure they've done all the experimenting necessary! And I wanted to try liquid because I want to make the dry kind more cloth diaper safe. That way I don't get them mixed up (by the way, the dry kind works great!). And of course, the liquid is soooo much cheaper than the dry kind (note...remember that dream home of mine....closer my friends, each penny saved means I'm closer).

The recipe was pretty easy. But I wanted to make sure I was still able to do it with kids awake. I try to do things like this during nap time, but every time I do something someone wakes up! I'm glad I waited to do this when Matt was home because low and behold, little curiosity was alive and awake!

The recipe called for the ingredients as the dry soap. It's simply borax, washing soda, and a bar of Fels-naptha soap.

First, you grate an entire bar of soap. I used a cheese grater.


Next, you mix 1 cup of washing soda with 1/2 cup borax together in a separate bowl.


You then mix 4 cups of hot water with all of the grated soap. You cook it over medium high heat until the yellow soap is dissolved. This took me about 7 minutes.


You then fill half of the 5 gallon bucket with hot water. As you can see, Mr. Curiosity was very interested in this.


No worries here my friends, I didn't let him endanger himself!


After you fill the bucket half way with water, you pour the hot soap into it.


As well as the powdered mixture.


You then stir with Mr. Curiosity's help of course to make sure it's mixed together very well.




Once you've finished stirring, you need to finish filling the bucket with water. I then stirred it again.


After it's mixed together nicely you're supposed to cover it and let it sit overnight. It's apparently supposed to be sort of gelled in the morning. You stir it again, then fill half of a laundry soap container with the soap, and then fill the other half with water. The Duggar recipe said to shake it up before each use because it does gel. I don't have a high efficiency machine so it will only make about 180 loads for me. But seeing as that it only cost me about $1.50 and makes 10 gallons of soap (again dream home...) I'm happy! Each load calls for 5/8 cup of soap for top loading machine.

By the way, this soap is low sudsing, so it's okay to use in high efficiency machines.

I also made dish soap today, but I'll save that for another day, when I'm not so exhausted!

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