I made....

...laundry soap! I did some research and found a recipe for homemade laundry soap and after shopping around for the ingredients I whipped together a batch. When using 1 tablespoon per batch, like the recipe said, the price per load would come out to be 3 cents rather than 25 - 50 cents for store bought brands! We thought we might as well give it a try!

The ingredients:

1/2 cup Fels-Naptha (or any other brand of bar soap) grated,

1 cup WASHING soda, (not to be confused with BAKING soda, they are NOT the same thing)

1 cup Borax laundry booster

The recipe said to use 1 tablespoon for a medium load and 2 tablespoons for a dirty load. We decided we needed a bit more so we have been using about an 1/8 of a cup.

When I began grating the Fels-Naptha soap we were surprised to see the lovely curls that dropped from the grater!

Here is the bar soap, washing soda, and Borax all mixed together. It is a little hard to make sure the there is an equal amount of bar soap and the powder but it does work!

Mom recommended I test the "amazing" laundry soap by putting Hershey's syrup, ketchup, and mustard on a clean sock and rub it into the fabric. Then, without rinsing the sock out, I threw it into the washer and waited for to the load to finish to examine the effects of the laundry soap. Now, it was a white load, so I did add a small amount of bleach to the load. When I pulled the sock out, all I saw was a little of the Hershey's syrup and just barely any ketchup and didn't see any mustard! If any of those had really spilt on our clothing we would have rinsed it out in the sink before putting it in the washer, so to see those results from stains that were rubbed and left in was quite exciting! Gracie and I just made another 2 batches this afternoon!