How To Make Homemade Laundry Soap

and save yourself a lot of money!

I saw that one of my friends made her own laundry soap and that it was super cheap, so I decided to try. I used the recipe that is shown here. It is really easy and I found most of the ingredients in Walmart (except the washing soda)Ingredients:
1 1/2 c. 20 Mule Team Borax
1 1/2 c. Washing Soda
Bar Soap
*note washing soda is NOT baking soda. I couldn't find washing soda in walmart. I wasn't sure where to get it, but looked online and found that you can buy it at your local swimming pool supply store. I got mine at Brady's here in Pocatello. It is also known as Soda Ash. When I asked about it, the guy at the store asked me what it was for and I told him I was going to make laundry soap, and he thought I was a little crazy. All they had is a 50 lb bag of it, which is a lot when all I needed was 1 1/2 cups, so if anyone in Pocatello wants to try to make it and doesn't want to buy 50 pounds of it, I can sell them some of it. With the bar soap, I used Zote. It is a bar laundry soap that is cheap, I got it for 97 cents. Another popular soap to use is Fels-Naptha bar soap. You can use any kind of bar soap you want. That is what your clothes will smell like.

1. Grate the soap into 18 c. of water. Heat the water on the stove until the soap is melted.
2. Add the washing soda. Stir until dissolved.

3. Add the borax. Sir until dissolved.
4. In a 5 gallon bucket, add 3 gallons of water. In the video, the recipe says to add 4 gallons and 2 cups, but when I added the 3 gallons (it might have been 3 1/2 gallons) and then the soap mixture, my 5 gallon bucket was pretty full.

5. Stir the mixture and then put a lid on and let set for 24 hours. After 24 hours, it will be a gel like watery mixture. Mix well, and then it is ready to use. Use 1/2 c. for top load washers and 1/4 c. for front load washers. This laundry soap is supposedly comparable to Tide. Tide costs about 20 cents per load. This laundry soap costs about 2.5 cents per load. A HUGE savings. I did one load, and it seemed to work fine. I'll know if it really works great tomorrow when I do all of my laundry.