Thursday, April 8, 2010

Homemade Laundry Detergent


I made liquid laundry detergent today. Yay, me! It's something I have been *meaning to do* for an eon. I can't believe I was so lazy now, it is very easy and cheap too.

All you need is borax (handle with care; I wore disposable gloves), washing soda, pure soap (Sunlight, Lux Flakes, Ivory, Velvet) and water! I also added lavender essential oil, which smells great, and next time I will try eucalyptus and see which of the two I like better. You could make it any essential oil that catches your fancy though. Hmmm. Now I am thinking of rose and geranium.

I used Jodie's recipe she posted on this forum, I found it through good ole Google.

International readers, please take note; the cup measurement used is a metric cup (250 ml). US cup sizes (giggle), both legal and customary, are slightly smaller. They are 240 ml and 237 ml respectively. I don 't believe the measurement needs to be absolutely exact, so I would probably add another 1/4 of a cup or so to even it out.

If anyone is still using the old fashioned IMPERIAL cup measures, use a little less than a cup.

It makes 10 litres, people. For those of you in the US, that is a little over 2 and a half gallons.

I used some plastic milk cartons (3 x 3 litres and 1 x 1 litre one) to bottle the mixture. We go through about a million litres of milk (it seems that way ;p) a week in this family, so it felt good to reuse them. I'll be giving some to my MIL too as we've both run out of the store bought version - at the perfect time!

Will post pics later today! DONE.

Naturally, I will not be held responsible for any mishaps with the recipe, it's not mine, so please use at your own discretion. I find it works great for me. Follow the directions for handling the borax and the washing soda and all should be sweet. Litre is not a typo, we spell it that way :D

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Thanks. Looking forward to trying the recipe and the new product. Its nice to go back to basics (in some things) like our grandmothers did. Home made.