I wanted to update you about the home made laundry soap I made a few weeks ago. I tried the powdered variety, but since we have well water it didn't really dissolve as well as I like. So, I changed to a gel variety. It's basically the same recipe. You just add water to it and let the soap, borax, and soda ash dissolve.
The first round of gel laundry soap was too thin and watery. I suspect I just wasn't using enough Ivory soap to make the batch, so I switched to larger bars - bath size bars. The next batch came out the way I expected. A thick, white gel-ish soap.
I use 1/2 cup of the gel per load. I hang my clothes on the clothesline, so one of the real tests was whether it made my clothes stiff. It didn't. Even the towels come off the line fairly soft. I don't use fabric softener, so this was a real victory as Son complains that with commercial laundry soap, the towels are rough.
The home made laundry soap doesn't have any fragrances or dyes in it, and it doesn't have chemicals in it that I can't pronounce. Ivory soap is real soap - fat, lye, and water - so I don't have to worry about unusual chemicals in that, either.
If you make your own home made bath or cleaning soap, you should have no problem using that in your laundry soap recipe.
This kind of laundry soap won't get you out of your debt problems, but it is a beginning in learning how to live without so many commercial products. At a later time, I'll share with you how to make bath soap in your crock pot so you can have it on hand for personal use, for general cleaning, or for making laundry soap. I will say that a crock pot will produce about three pounds of soap, which is really quite a bit. The larger bars of Ivory soap are only 4 ounces.
It's a very satisfying project to undertake.
