Hellooooooooo beefriends, hope y'all are doing well today. We are getting snowed on again while it is simultaneously still melting the previous blizzard, lol, which is just the perfect example of Colorado's mad weather. ;)
Today I did a little experiment in making my own laundry soap, so I thought I would share.
A lot of homemade laundry soap recipes are essentially: bar of soap, grated + washing soda + borax. However, borax is actually toxic, so I don't want to use that - if the point of making your own soap is to avoid using toxic materials, why would you? So I usually just buy free+clear types of laundry soap (because allergies) instead of making my own.
However, I had recently tried a bar of Dr. Bronner's soap, and surprise! I'm allergic to that, too. I think it's maybe the jojoba oil or the hemp oil, as I got the unscented variety and I think all the other ingredients are fine for me. Either would make sense, since seeds in general fall under my nickel allergy (jojoba oil comes from the seeds, and I imagine hemp does too), and I think hemp is a type of grass, and I am allergic to almost all the grasses (and I live in the prairie. Yeah, fun times, lol). Anyway, I had already used it several times so I couldn't give it away to anyone, and I wondered what to do with it, as I didn't want to waste it.
In the past, I have used liquid Dr. Bronner's and not rashed from it, so I think maybe it was a matter of "dilute, dilute, dilute!" as it instructs you to do with the liquid, and the bar was just too concentrated. So I figured, maybe I could make laundry soap with it, and therefore it would be diluted, and I could even just use it for things other than clothes (like, when I wash my cloth shopping bags or a throw rug or something like that), so it wasn't right up on my skin all the time.
So here was my experiment!
1 bar of Dr. Bronner's, smashed up with a hammer (since I didn't want to ruin my only food grater by grating soap with it, lol). 1 cup of baking soda (rather than washing soda which I didn't have, but I've used baking soda in the wash before to take out smells). 1 cup of epsom salt (which you can use as a fabric softener, I've done that before, too). I figure I've got soap, smell remover, and fabric softener, that's all I really need in laundry soap, right? I reused an old catnip jar and whey protein scoop - I have so many of those. Now I just have to do a test load of laundry with it, but I just washed my shopping bags a couple of days ago - they're still hanging on the line, lol.
So there is my first Test Recipe for laundry soap. I'll let you know how it works out once I've done a load with it. :) Do any of y'all make your own washing soap for laundry? What do you use?
Don't forget
You have until March 20th to enter my International Day of Happiness Challenge with a chance to win a Lotus Miner! So far I only have two entries, so your odds are pretty good! :)