Laura Occasionally Blogs

Recipe

I basically used this recipe, only I made a quarter recipe so that it would fit in an empty soap pump which held about 1 cup of liquid.

* 1 cup distilled water
* 1 ounce bar soap (approx; I grated about 3/4 inch off a 3.5-inch, 5oz bar of Dr. Bronner's Baby Mild Castile Soap)
* 1/4 tsp liquid glycerin
* 1/4 tsp vitamin E oil (I'd like to use pure vitamin E, but I used a CVS product containing palm oil because we had it around the house. no scary chemicals detected in ingredients list)
* 2 drops Sweet Orange essential oil (I wanted to go light on this, but next time, I will use more - this is currently undetectable over the general scent of soap)

Grate the bar soap and add to water. Bring to a boil. Simmer until the soap is fully melted, about 5 minutes (more if you do a bigger recipe). Remove from heat. Add rest of ingredients. Allow to cool. At this point, you will have what amounts to liquid with a few soap bubbles in it. Bottle and let rest overnight. It will turn into a luxurious pearly gel.

Effectiveness

I haven't tested it on truly grimy hands, but it seems to work fine for everyday handwashing, and leaves hands feeling soft.

Frugality

Distilled water is $1 per gallon, or 6 cents per cup. (I used distilled water rather than tap because this recipe has no preservative - the usual suspects, vinegar, salt, or baking soda, would dry out the skin.) A bar of castile soap costs $4, or 80 cents per ounce. My $7 bottle of glycerin contains 14 ounces, which comes out to about 2 cents for a quarter teaspoon. We had the vitamin E just lying around and I don't remember how much it cost, so I won't count that (you could easily leave it out). The essential oils were about 5 cents for 2-3 drops; make it 10 cents because I plan to use twice that amount next time.

All that comes out to 98 cents for an 8-ounce bottle of hand soap. This is about half the cost of buying equivalently-sized bottles of CVS brand hand soap or Softsoap, and competitive with buying hand soap refills in bulk.

I am re-entering a new obsession with gentle, nontoxic, green, frugal, diy cleaning products, and I've bookmarked a ton of recipes. My first adventure: homemade laundry soap.

Recipe

It was sort of hard to find one that didn't have borax. I find borax to be a skin irritant and the whole point of this was to create something that would be friendly with my extremely sensitive skin. I also wanted liquid because I don't know how to load powder into our washer. I got this from Livington Family Adventures and remeasured to scaleable ratios:

3 parts liquid castille soap (we used Dr. Bronner's Baby Mild)
3 parts baking soda
1 part coarse sea salt
10 parts hot water

Dissolve salt and baking soda in hot water. Stir. Add castille soap and stir.

Use 1/2 cup per load of laundry (in our machine, this filled perfectly up to the thing that says "MAX")

Effectiveness

See
The clothes look clean. Colors have not faded. There are no visible stains, though, note that I didn't test this on majorly stained things to being with (fyi, I've heard you should pre-treat stains with vinegar!)

Sniff
If I had to characterize the scent, it would be "nothing! nothing! in fact it smells like nothing at all!" (tm Dr Cox) Which is perfect. I don't like the fakey "fresh" smell of detergent. If you inhale deeply, you detect a faint, not unpleasant baking soda scent. The musty scent of some old attic rescue shirts was totally eradicated. Some traces of body odor were still detectable when inhaling underarms of cotton T-shirts that had been sweated in, but I'm not sure it's any worse than normal - I don't typically subject laundry to this level of scrutiny.

Savor
Clothes fresh out of the dryer felt soft and nice. I haven't worn them yet, but I don't anticipate any itch problems considering the ingredients.

Frugality

Start-up costs were sort of high because we had to buy liquid castille soap. We got 32 fl oz for $13.99. Since we only use 1 oz for every 24 oz of water, this is enough soap for 800 ounces (100 cups) of laundry detergent, or 200 loads of laundry. Doing about a load of a laundry a week, we're set for the next four years. Assuming the baking soda and salt also lasts that long, following this recipe has us spending under $5 a year on laundry detergent. Why wasn't I doing this in college??