Poco Mountain Girl

We’ve been making our own laundry soap powder for a while now. It works great, it’s cheap and easy to make, and is a lot more natural than most of the laundry soaps you can buy.

Just as an aside, the little cloud of tangles on the back of this child’s head is something she wakes up with every morning without fail.

If you want to try making your own laundry soap, you’ll need 3 ingredients: a bar of soap, borax, and washing soda.

For the bar soap, I used Ivory, but just find one with the purest ingredients you can. You’d be surprised at all the junk a lot of bar soaps have in them!

Borax is something I usually have on hand as a laundry booster. Walmart has it near the cleaning supplies or laundry detergent.

Washing soda is different than baking soda. I found it at my local King Soopers, but you can probably find it at other grocery stores, or maybe even Walmart.

Here’s how you make the soap:

Step 1: In a mixing bowl or other container, stir together 1 cup each of Borax and washing soda.

Step 2: Grate 1 bar of soap. This is the part where everyone gasps. Yes, I let my 3-year old use the cheese grater.

Step 3: Add the grated soap to the bowl and stir or cover and shake well. Here is what the finished result looks like.

Now put it in a covered container and you are done!

And the best part? All you need is 2 tablespoons for a load of laundry. When you do your laundry, put the soap powder in first and let it dissolve before putting your clothes in, so the soap gratings can melt nicely. We don’t use the very tiniest holes on the grater, since that would take forever, but the gratings we make always work fine as long as I put them in before the clothes.

Zia usually makes our laundry soap herself. Sometimes it takes a few days for her to grate the bar soap, but she really likes to do it in small segments and keep returning to it as kind of an ongoing project.

“Mamma, can I watch a movie?” (Drags herself dejectedly over and tugs at my shirt with a bored little sigh.) Me: “Want to grate some soap?” Perks right up: “Sure!”

This entry was posted on Friday, April 15th, 2011 at 6:27 am and is filed under Little Redhead Girl, Making Stuff, Recipes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.