Pinterest is a great diversion, a way to get inspired, a fun way to connect with creative people, and a new way to fantasize about your dream home, vacation, or potentially awesome crafting skills. My boards include DIY I’d Actually Like to Do, Fun Projects for Kids, and Great Ideas and DIY Home Tips. Sprinkled among those are dream home and fashion boards, as well as some ambitious recipes. With DIY, however, I wanted to pin things that I could potentially do without getting frustrated or purchasing materials that sit on a shelf for months unused (Hello Wool Dryer Ball Tutorial).
To inspire myself to move past pinning to actually doing, I created my Pinterest IRL board. It only boasts one project to date, Ezra’s 3rd Birthday Construction Cake, but I’m going to add Homemade Laundry Detergent today.
I found this homemade laundry detergent recipe on Pinterest from Being Creative to Keep My Sanity and decided to try it out at my house. $20 for 9 months to a year’s worth of laundry detergent definitely appealed to me. Plus, cutting down on trips to the store, manufacturing of detergent, and all that packaging seemed eco-minded to me.
Here’s all that you need to make the detergent:
From the Laundry Isle:
1 55 oz (3 lb 7 oz) box Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda
1 4 lb box (2.15 kg or 76 oz) Borax
3 Bars Fels-naptha Soap (I found at the grocery store, but not Walmart)
Optional: Oxyclean or Store Brand. I bought a 6 oz of the Sun Oxygen Cleaner and used half.
From the Baking Isle:
1 4lb box Baking Soda
From Home Improvement Isle:
5 gallon Bucket (I used an orange one from Home Depot)
At Home:
1 Cheese Grater
1 Garbage Bag
This really is a simple recipe, except grating the soap is a time-consuming hassle. The source says you can use a cheese grater or a food processor to get it into small bits. Be warned: this is hard soap. I tried it in my food processor and it simply stuck to the blades. After I’d grated most of my soap, a friend recommended softening it a bit in the microwave before using the food processor. If you try this and it works, please let me know!
I would absolutely recommend using a standing grater if you have one (I don’t). My hands were tired!
After you’ve grated, it couldn’t be easier.
Line your bucket, then dump in the ingredients. I recommend putting in half of everything, mixing, then putting the other half in and mixing. I learned this the hard way after dumping my soap at the bottom like the picture in the tutorial.
I mixed with my hands, lifting the bag to make sure all the soap didn’t sit at the bottom, then I was done! You can keep a bit in a small container if you don’t have room in your laundry room to store the bucket and use a tablespoon or the scoop from your Oxyclean.
The tutorial recommends using 1 tablespoon, but the blog author says she uses two (you’ll see this in the comments) so I think that’s why her batch only lasted 9 months. My experience with cloth diaper detergent says that less is more – if a recipe calls for 1 tablespoon, try that first. This recipe does not have much of a smell, so if you like pretty smelling laundry, you might consider trying the wool dryer tutorial above (it will also cut your drying time by half!).
I tried my kid’s clothes last night using 1 tablespoon in cold water and I was happy with the results!
If you try this tutorial, please feel free to come back and share what you think!
You know I’ve heard others talking about this and hadn’t actually seen the recipe yet – so glad you posted it!