I’ve been making this detergent since Ariel was a baby.  It works great for everything, including cloth diapers.  (I use the “double dose” for cloth diapers, the single for pretty much everything else.)  Here I’ve cut the recipe in half for simplicity’s sake, because a half-batch fits in a gallon ice cream bucket (as shown).  That’s how I prefer to store it.

DIY Laundry Detergent

Here’s the recipe in brief, for those of you who like to get down to business. 🙂  For more details, keep reading.

DIY Laundry Detergent

Rachel Ramey

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Course Household

Ingredients

  

• 4 cups soap flakes/grated soap 1 part; typically 2 4-oz bars
• 6 cups borax 1-1/2 parts; somewhere around 3/4 box
• 8 cups baking soda 2 parts; about a 4-lb. box
• 100-300 drops essential oil

Instructions

 

• Grate the soap, if necessary.
• Measure and combine dry ingredients.
• Mix well.
• Add essential oil and mix thoroughly.
• To Use: Use 2 Tbsp/load. For a heavily-soiled load, use up to 4 Tbsp./load.

Notes

Yields 18 cups.
(May be doubled.)

Get Your Ingredients Together

This recipe calls for soap, borax, baking soda, and (optionally) essential oil.

Soap

You can just measure out soap flakes, but those are pretty well impossible to find here in the U.S.  If you’re in Europe, you might be able to buy them and save yourself a step.  Most of us have to start by making soap flakes.  I prefer to use castile soap — I’ve used Dr. Bronner’s and I’ve used Kirk’s (from Vitacost).  It’s been a while, but if I recall correctly, the Dr. Bronner’s bars are a little smaller, so make sure to check if you’re using those.

I’ve also used Ivory.  Ivory is not quite as good for your skin, because it’s had the glycerin removed, but it’s not full of awful additives.  It does tend to be drier than the castile soaps, so I find it creates a lot of “dust” when I grate it, and I’d recommend a dust mask.  (It’s not fun inhaling soap.)

There are a few options for getting it grated.  If you have a food processor, you can probably put it through there with the shredding blade.  (Use the finer one, like you’d use for parmesan, not the larger one like you’d use for cheddar.)

You can “explode” it in the microwave.  What do I mean by that?  Well, you can put a bar of soap in the microwave for a minute and it “puffs up.” I understand this works really well with Ivory, ‘though I’ve not tried it.  Jillee (of One Good Thing by Jillee) points out that other soaps stink when you do this — and she’s right.  I tried the Kirk’s and it did smell funky.  I’m not sure if it’s inherently because of the soap smell, though, or because it burnt.

The castile soap is denser, so the outsides puffed and got brittle — and burned — and the middle just stayed hard.  But the brittle parts were really nice to work with.  All you have to do after “puffing” it is (let it cool and) put it in a baggie and crush it.  So I might try cutting a bar into fourths and try it again.

In the meantime, the other option is to grate it by hand.  This is my least favorite part of the whole process because it feels like it takes forever, but it’s not too bad.

When it’s all grated, it will look something like this:

But then you can kind of crumble it between your hands and it will get even finer, like this:

Borax

Borax is the one ingredient in the mix that many people will consider “unusual.” It’s a laundry booster, and you’ll likely find it on the laundry aisle — probably either on the very top or very bottom shelf.  If you don’t see it at one store, try another.  (Wal-Mart often has it.  Or try the hardware store.)

You don’t really want to breathe this, either, so take care not to “puff” it everywhere when you pour/stir.

Baking Soda

Because many detergent recipes call for washing soda, some of you are probably wondering if this recipe is written correctly or if it’s a typo.  It really is baking soda.  Which is nice because baking soda is consistently easy to find and washing soda is kind of hit-or-miss.

Essential Oils

Here’s where you can have some fun with this.  You don’t have to use the essential oil at all; you can leave it out if you want/need to.  But there are benefits to including it.  Those benefits differ depending on what you use, so let’s talk about which oils to choose.

Citrus essential oils help cut grease and freshen laundry.  For this reason, lemon is a common option.  However, lemon is not recommended for use around very tiny babies (in this small a quantity it’s probably okay, but just to be safe…) and because lemon is a very invigorating scent I’m told that (from a friend’s experience!) it might not be the greatest idea for use with your sheets if you ever want to sleep. 🙂  So lemon can be a good option if you don’t have young children, and a great option for a detergent you’ll use with dish cloths and such, but might not be your best bet as an all-purpose option.

For all of these reasons, lavender is another popular choice.  It’s soothing, so there are no worries about being able to sleep at bedtime.  It’s safe for pretty much any baby except preemies (and personally, I wouldn’t have an issue with using it in this particular application even with a preemie so long as he’s not a micro-preemie).  It’s just an all-around gentle option.  But it doesn’t have the specifically “brightening” sort of benefit of the citruses.

Because of all of those things, I chose sweet orange for my all-purpose detergent.  It’s a citrus, so it has a lot of the same benefits as lemon, ‘though not necessarily to the same degree.  It’s an energizing/uplifting aroma, but not to the point of wakefulness; in fact, it can be used at bedtime, because it’s so much sweeter/milder.  And it can be used — even therapeutically — at a younger age than lemon.  (I’ve found it to be pretty universally liked, too.  I have some lavender-haters at my house.)

There are a variety of things you can do with other oils, though, for special purposes.  You could use a germ-busting blend like Shield in laundry when the kids have been sick or for dish cloths, etc.  Tea tree is a good mildew-fighter, so it’s a good towel/dish rag option, too.  And you might even consider an insect-repellent blend like Deflect for the clothes you’re about to pack for summer camp!

If you want to scent this in smaller quantities for something like this, you’ll want around 15-30 drops for every 2 cups of detergent.

Now, speaking of quantity, based on the original recipe I was working with, I should have used 135-270 drops of essential oil for this one batch.  (Personally, I’d stick with the lower end simply because it gets expensive if you increase it too much!)  But I forgot my bottle of orange essential oil was the smaller size bottle, so I ran out.  I only had around 100 drops, and it still smells quite nice, so I’m going to say that’s sufficient-but-low.  🙂

The Process

This stuff is pretty simple to make.  Getting the soap into “flake” form is the hardest part. Once you’ve done that, you’re home-free. 🙂

Mix up all the dry ingredients really well.

Then add the essential oils and mix it well again.  I would recommend letting it sit for a couple of days if you have time, and stirring it once or twice a day, just to be sure the essential oil is well-distributed throughout.  As long as the oil you’re using is not something contraindicated for ingestion, you don’t have to be super-careful about what you mix it in – just make sure you wash it well with soap and water when you’re done.

(There’s no reason you can’t eat out of a container after you’ve used it to mix this but you don’t want to eat out of it while there’s still residue in it from this, if you know what I mean.)  I used a bucket, just because this is a pretty large quantity and you want to have room to mix.  I wouldn’t mix it directly in the ice cream bucket because there’s not really enough maneuvering space to get it mixed up well.

Storage

Storage is pretty simple, too.  Like I said, I store mine in a gallon ice cream tub.  (If there’s still writing on your tub you can get it off — at least mostly — with this method.  Mine left a bit of a “stain” behind.)

If I make the double-sized batch, I store whatever will fit in the ice cream tub and keep the excess in a gallon ziploc bag until we’ve used up enough from the ice cream tub to allow it to fit.

You may even have a scoop lying around that you can use.  Baby formula, goat milk powder, protein powder, and coffee are all items that often come with scoops in the right general size range.  If you have one of these left over, check it to see if it happens to be 2 Tbsp. — a lot of them are.