Soap Making 101~Suds of Savings

So there has been some buzz lately about soap making. A few of my friends have tried it and managed to have a good experience. So I thought to myself, maybe I should try it also. There are really two major reasons why. First it's relatively green and good for the environment, not to mention my washing machine. Second, its CHEAP! The total cost to make 900 loads of laundry soap comes out to about $0.012 cents per load. THATS less than a penny and a half! Being game to try all things new, I visited our local grocer and came home with the products I needed. I enlisted the help of the girls and we pretended we were pioneers in the "old days" making our own soap!

I found 11 recipes for liquid Laundry soap. So using the one I liked best we began.

Cheese grater, Borax, washing SODA and bar soap. Now here is the deal. The recipe calls for Fels Naptha. I couldn't find it. Since the recipes all say you can substitute other brands I did. Castile soap is made with coconut. These are all purpose soaps that I didn't even KNOW existed.

I laughed when I read you could do dishes, shower, bathe, laundry and wash grease from woodwork and is safe for finishes! WOW!

Next recipe I am going to substitute 2 Irish Spring Orange Zest bars. NO bars that have added moisturizers! They could stain your laundry.

Grade your bar of soap.

I thought this would be messy. It was not. This was my only mess.

My pile of soap. I believe that my soap would have taken on whatever color the original bar used was. My soap did in fact turn out yellowish/green.

Boil 4 cups of water and melt the shredded bar. This took about 3 minutes once I had a roiling boil.

Find a huge container that will hold 5 gallons of water. A 5 gallon bucket would be ideal. It does need a lid. Pour 5 gallons of water into container and add your boiled soap mix.

Add One Cup of Arm & Hammer Washing SODA. NOT baking SODA! NOT laundry soap! You can find this right next to the powdered laundry soap.

Add one cup of Borax. Side note: can you tell I haven't figured out why the pictures don't stay flipped the way I put them?

Pour it in and mix....

And mix some more!

Now if I would have read the instructions fully, I would have used 5 Gallons of HOT water and probably would not have had these lumps I had to pull out!

Keep stirring! Everything needs to mix together and dissolve. Here Hali and Abby were trying to see how big of a bubble they could create!

How we store our soap. Here is the tricky part. This recipe makes 10 Gallons! So... I took my empty Era bottle, rinsed it out and filled it half way with the soap (Its like a gel). Then I added the other half up to the top with water. Shake to mix before using. When my ERA container is empty I will fill it half way up with soap from the 5 gallon bucket and add more water. I suppose you could use Two 5 gallon buckets if you wanted to make it all up at full strength at  once.

Recipe

1 Bar of Fels Naptha Soap or 2 bars of Ivory (or your favorite bar)

1 Cup of Borax

1 Cup of Washing Soda

The instructions say to use 5/8 of a cup per load.