going green with our laundry

A couple of months ago, I Tweeted about making laundry soap one weekend. I actually thought I had blogged about it, but it turns out I was kind of a slacker that week.

For Christmas, I received two copies of “Green Clean: The Environmentally Sound Guide to Cleaning Your Home.” (I gave one of the copies to a friend, since I missed the return deadline by a few days.) I had high hopes for this book. My mom has owned a copy for years, and has been making her own cleaning products since I was in college. I used to think she was a little weird for making her own cleaning products. I mean, it’s SO much easier to just buy stuff at the store.

I digress. Back to the book. I was really excited about this book, and it has different alternatives for making your own cleaning products, including laundry soap. The “recipe” for laundry detergent is:
1 part borax
1 part washing soda

I think I’ve proven that I don’t follow directions very well. But there’s nothing to this recipe. Two ingredients. Mix them together.

I had bought bars of washing soda in New York last summer, and I finally had the chance to use them. (Turns out, Ace Hardware sells the bars I was looking for in my town. Go figure.) I used a grater to grate the washing soda (since we didn’t have it in the powder form), and then added borax to a container. I shook the container to mix it all, and I was done! To make things easier, and to reuse the measuring cup from our old bottle of detergent, I cleaned the cup and threw it into the container with the new laundry powder.

The best part about the laundry soap is that I don’t have to worry about touching it. I know what’s in there and I don’t have to stress out about it being on my hand after pouring it into the washer, or the cat getting into it (because she’s curious.) It’s natural. Our clothes are clean, and nobody has had an allergic reaction to the new soap. It also cost very little ($1 for a bar of washing soda, $4.29 for a box of borax on alice.com) and we can make our own detergent when we run out. No more trips to Target on the other side of town to buy it.

And as a side note? I found the washing soda on Alice.com for only $2.99. Score.

We’re about three months into using our homemade laundry soap, and I am always wondering why we didn’t think of it sooner.