The recipe that most people use, when making their own is:

A bar of Fels Naptha soap

1 ½ cups washing soda

1 ½ cups borax

Most instructions say to grate the soap into a sauce pan, add 6 cups of water and heat until the soap melts. Add the soda and borax and mix until it’s smooth.

You’ll need a large bucket or other container next. Add 4 cups hot water to the bucket, add the soap mixture and stir. Now add a gallon to water to the bucket and stir again.

Let this sit overnight and you’ll have laundry gel. You use about a half a cup to a load of laundry.

This ‘gel’ doesn’t really look like liquid laundry detergent. In my opinion it resembles pudding.

If you’ve saved an old liquid laundry detergent container you can pour this into it before it sets up. It’s easy to store that way.

Personally, I found all that too much trouble. What I did was melt the soap in a glass measuring cup in the microwave. I then poured the glob into a large plastic pitcher, added the rest of the ingredients and slowly added water. I then used a long bullet hand blender to mix the stuff up. I did not use the entire gallon of water so mine was a little stronger. I then poured it into an old liquid detergent bottle and used about a quarter cup per laundry load.

Some folks even find that is too much trouble. You can mix the three dry ingredients together and just use a couple of tablespoons per load. Now that’s easy!

This homemade laundry soap doesn’t suds much at all. Don’t worry – you don’t need the suds to get your clothes clean.

When looking for the ingredients to make the laundry soap please note that washing soda is NOT baking soda. You’ll find washing soda in the laundry aisle in a big yellow box made by the same company as the baking soda. The borax is on the same aisle. If you can’t find Fels Naptha, use any ‘real’ soap. Ivory is real soap and works great in this recipe.

Try it, at least once. See if you don’t like saving money.

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