Homemade Laundry Detergent

1 bar soap
1/2 cup borax
2 small boxes of baking soda (or 1 cup washing soda if you are too lazy to make your own)
3 jugs (these can be milk or water jugs or even empty detergent containers, though if you are using a container that isn't one gallon, you will need to measure your water with a measuring cup.)
3 gallons of water

Take 2 of the small boxes of baking soda and spread out in a couple of cake pans. Bake at 450 degrees for 1 hour. At this point, take a pan out of the oven and look at the powder. Is it shiny still? Put it back in the oven for another 10 mins, then check it again. Is it matte and kind of grainy? (Compare to unbaked baking soda if you need to.) If so, take it out of the oven and allow to cool. Realize that when baking soda changes to washing soda, not only does it's use as a cleaner change, but it cooks down so you end up with less volume. You won't need all of the washing soda you made for this recipe, but just save the rest of it, because you can use it to make homemade dishwasher detergent.

So now we can start making the detergent. Grate the bar of soap with a cheese grater. Add 1 quart of your water to a saucepan. Melt the soap shreds in the water over medium heat, stirring constantly. If it starts to foam up and you think it might bubble over, remove it from the heat for a minute and then return to burner. Once soap is dissolved (this is the most tedious step), add in 1/2 cup of borax and 1 cup of washing soda. Stirring well after each addition. Let cool slightly, but not to the point where the powders get hard again. After cooled a bit (enough not to melt the jugs you are pouring it into), pour the soup solution evenly into the 3 jugs. This can be messy. I ended up mixing well and using a measuring cup and adding it one cup at a time to the jugs through a funnel. Once you are done with that, if you are using gallon jugs, you can just fill them the rest of the way up with water (Do this slowly so it doesn't foam up. If you start getting a lot of foam on top, you can wait a half an hour or so and then finish adding water.) If you are not using gallon sz jugs, you will need to add 2 gallons and 3 qts more water evenly into the 3 containers.

Now close your jugs up, shake them really good, and set them somewhere out of the way and forget about them for about 24 hours. The next day, shake it up again really well and you are good to go! You will want to shake it up every time before you use it. If you have small lumps of powder in your solution, that is perfectly fine, just make sure you are shaking it each time so that the lumps are evenly distributed throughout your loads. I use about 1/2 a cup per load for my HE machine. I like to double this recipe so I have enough to last a while and only have to melt the soap once since that's the step I hate the most.

This recipe IS NOT cloth diaper safe.