make your own laundry soap

i decided to make our own cloth diaper safe laundry soap!

here's how i did it.

ingredients

you can use just about any bar soap you like. a lot of laundry soap recipes suggest fels-naptha, which is marketed as a laundry bar soap. fels-naptha can be harsh, so i chose not to use it on our diapers. instead i chose baby soap. 

i found these ingredients in the laundry aisle at my local wal-mart.  (the soap was in the baby section.) all of the ingredients cost $8. we used to pay $18 for a small box of tide free and clear, and that's inexpensive compared to other cloth diaper laundry soaps.

1. grate bar soap with a cheese grater

2. i then put it in my old detergent box, and mixed it with equal parts borax (a deodorizer) and arm & hammer washing soda (removes particles and odors). they are both white powders. i think i ended up using about 3 cups of each. the bar soap came out to about two cups after grating it. 

i stirred it with a pasta spoon until it was thoroughly mixed together. we now have about 8 cups of detergent.

for an added boost, you can add a few scoops of oxy-clean or another stain removing powder. 

use one tablespoon for regular loads, or two tablespoons for large or extra soiled loads.
that's $8 for 128 loads of laundry. 
that's $0.06 per load. 

we plan to use this for clothes as well as diapers.