Frugal Friday: Homemade Laundry Soap

So I'm a HUGE Pinterest fanatic and I honestly online hoard a bunch of pins that catch my eye...well mostly with things I hope to try out. One of the most successful pins that I have made is making my own homemade laundry soap.  A friend of mine actually gave me the idea first a long while ago but I never got around to trying it out for myself until I stumbled upon it on Pinterest.

I have sensitive skin and have been an avid Tide laundry soap user for years and was leary on using the homemade recipe for fear of breaking out in eczema or making my skin condition worse.  However, my friend said her kids have sensitve skin too and they didn't break out in anything.  Also, she even used it on her baby's clothing instead of using Dreft baby laundry detergent which is stinking expensive.  The recipe my friend used is quite similar to one I found online via Pinterest at Being Creative to Keep My Sanity so I went with that.

So with the hubby's approval I went forth and got all the ingredients/supplies that I needed which I could find at my local Wal-Mart. 

Here's the list:

1 4 lb 12 oz box Borax (2.15 kg or 76 oz) found in the detergent isle

1 4 lb box Arm & Hammer Baking Soda (1.81 kg) found in the cooking isle

1 box Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda 55 oz (3 lb 7 oz) found in the detergent isle

3 bars of Fels-Naptha soap, found in the detergent isle (if you use Zote bars use 2 bars instead, Zote can be found at Home Depot)

2 small containers of Oxy Clean or store brand Oxy Clean (try to get about 3.5 lbs total (1.58 kg)) found in the detergent isle. (I already had a Costco sized box of the stuff so I just measured this out in my batch)

The instructions said to grate the Fels Naptha soap on a cheese grater or use a food processor.  I don't have a food processor so I went for the cheese grater option (I got a separate one just for this purpose).  That was a BIG mistake to do.  Not only did it take me forever to grate one bar of soap, the soap would get clogged in the holes of the grater.  I really didn't want to use any of my kitchen appliances and have them "tainted" with soap, but I gave in and first used my automatic shredder to grate the soap and then used my blender to ground up the "grated cheeselike soap".  After all of that I mixed everything into a big enough container. 

I made this batch of soap back in the beginning of December 2011 and it cost me roughly $12-$15.  The cool part of making your own homemade laundry soap is that all you need to use is just 1 tablespoon (I actually use 2 tablespoons), so this whole thing will stretch for a long while. Here are some pictures of my batch of soap and I apologize that they are not of good quality since I'm too LAZY to use my actual digital camera and just use my iPhone instead. The last pic is as of today and I still have lots left to use! I am guessing it'll last me probably a few more months and I'll be surprised if I'll get to stretch out till this December. If that happens then that means I would have only spent $12-$15 for laundry soap for the WHOLE year! WOW! Whereas before I would clip coupons for Tide soap and wait for a sale to come up, then in the end I would have spent over $100 in soap for an entire year. YIKES!

I highly recommend trying this out if you're trying to cut costs somewhere in your household budget. I use it for all of our laundry and even for our infant son's clothing too ever since he was born six months ago.  I got my sister in Hawaii on the bandwagon, she uses more than the 1-2 tablespoon it asks for so she's on making her second batch of soap, but she's still saving $$$.  Go to Being Creative to Keep My Sanity for more of the how to and go over the comments if you have any concerns.  Especially for those who have those fancy schmanchy HE washers ;p, I got an old school top loader and the soap works absolutely fine. 

So this is my first installment on hopefully a weekly Frugal Friday tid bit that I have tried on my own or maybe something one of you could benefit from. 

On that note HAPPY ALOHA FRIDAY!!