...I made laundry detergent, and the baby helped!!

I was watching 19 Kids And Counting (or 18, or 17...however long ago it was!!), and Michelle Duggar mentioned that she makes her own laundry detergent. Never in my life had I even considered doing it, but when I heard her mention that they save hundreds of dollars a year by making it in stead of buying it....I jumped on the bandwagon! You can find the original recipe here, but I'm going to share how I do it also.

You will need:
-1 Fels-Naptha soap bar (right next to the Borax at Walmart, Kroger, and Target)
-1 cup Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda*
-1/2 cup Borax
-4 cups water to boil
-2 five gallon buckets ($2.50/ea at Walmart in the paint section)
-Lavender Essential Oil
-Tea Tree Essential Oil
-5 to 6 empty liquid detergent containers (or 9-10 xl pickle jars!)

*Baking Soda will not work, nor will Arm & Hammer Detergent - it must be sodium carbonate!!


Instructions:

Step 1: Grate the Fels-Naptha Bar

Step 2: Bring 4 cups of water to a boil and add the grated soap (yep, looks like cheese). Reduce heat to Medium heat, then whisk occasionally until all chunks of soap are dissolved. You do NOT want to rush through this part and end up with chunky liquid laundry detergent!

Step 3: While your soap is melting on the stove, fill one of the buckets half full with warm water. From this point on I completed all of the steps in the bathtub to avoid a huge mess, and it gave the little one just enough access that she could "help" without actually getting into any of it.

Step 4: Add 1/2 cup Borax and 1 cup Washing Soda to the bucket of warm water. (You can see a faint color change in my measuring cup at the 1/2 cup mark: bottom is Borax, top is washing soda.)

Step 5: Pour melted soap into the warm water and mix well with either a wisk or your hand. (Baby helped me here. Her cup had plain water.)

Step 6: Fill the bucket up the rest of the way with cold water (or let your assistant do it for you). The cold water helps the soap gel quicker. The Duggar option is to let it sit overnight to gel, but "aint' nobody got time fo' dat".

Step 7: Pour 1/2 of the contents of your first bucket into your second bucket, then continue to fill both of them to the top with cold water. If you choose to use just one 10 gallon bucket you can skip this part, but lifting a 10 gallon bucket to funnel the detergent into the storage containers is too heavy, and using a scoop can lead to too many spills for me. Do whatever works for you ;-)

Step 8: Add 10 drops per 2 gallons of Essential Oils. Here you see baby adding Tea Tree Oil to one bucket, and the other bucket we added Lavender. They smell great together also, but you can add whatever oils you prefer. Fels-Naptha has a light minty smell to begin with, so you could actually skip the oils alltogether if you prefer.

Step 9: Funnel your detergent into your storage containers. I added labels at the end, but to make it easy to tell what scent each container had I used the red-orange Tide bottles for my Lavender, and the white (Dreft) and green (Gain) bottles for the Tea Tree.

Finished!! We ended up with two Lavender, two Tea Tree, and one mixture. For long-term storage you can keep this detergent just like you would any store-bought brand. In the meanwhile, when you use your detergent make sure to shake the bottle a little before pouring it into your laundry just in case any of the oils separate to the top, or any bits of soap settle to the bottom.

-Top Load Machine- 5/8 Cup per load (Approx. 180 loads)
-Front Load Machines- ¼ Cup per load (Approx. 640 loads)

SPECIAL NOTE: This laundry detergent is NOT cloth diaper safe. The soap in recipes like this can cause buildup, so I've found other options for washing cloth diapers. Right now I use Charlie's Soap plus my DIY BacOut, but I also have an order of Soap Nuts coming. When the Soap Nuts come in I'll be experimenting with how well they work in our water and with how to make liquid laundry detrgent from them too!!