When I first heard about this challenge I thought it was going to be so hard! But, by the end of the week I had quite a few ideas. I went to the store with an idea in mind, but when I found Fels-Naptha soap I decided to try my hand at crafting my own homemade laundry detergent! I had wanted to do it for a while and thought that this would be a great time to try! So here it is!
HOMEMADE LAUNDRY DETERGENT
In order to stick with the "edible part" I headed over to the fruit department and grabbed a grapefruit.
I peeled it and dehydrated the bits.
Before
After
I then cut up my Fels-Naptha Soap bar. --This is a laundry soap bar, you could also use any gentle soap (Ivory/Castile/....)
[if you do this cut it up smaller than I did]
The soap bits then got blended in my food processor with the dried grapefruit.
Then measure out 1/2 cup of Washing Soda (not baking soda) and 1/2 cup of Borax and dump in with the soap. Blend it up good!
TADA! Your own Hand-Crafted Landry Detergent! To use it use one Tablespoon per load.
Here is the $$ breakdown:
3.99 Borax
2.99 Washing Soda
1.19 Fels-Naptha Soap
.69 Grapefruit
with tax: 9.21
after all the math, it comes out to .06 a load.
If you bought the ingredients on sale and/or used a cheaper bar of soap the price would be much lower.
Then to make sure it works, I smeared ketchup, mustard, chocolate,.... on a cloth then seperated it and washed half with homemade and half with storebought soap.
Looks pretty similar to me!
And there you have it, Homemade Laundry Detergent!
Thanks for looking!
ETA: Answers....
I am using a toploader machine.
This is a NON-Sudsing detergent. What cleans is the soap, not the bubbles.
You can't smell the grapefruit. The fels-naptha bar has a very strong scent. The mix itself I really don't like the smell of, but coming out of the wash, I love it. Has a citrus-y smell itself.
