Good morning!
I have put my quilt on hold for a little while because I haven't had a lot of free time, but fear not. I will complete it soon.
One thing I have done is tried to be more Eco-friendly. I started getting water delivered to my house instead of buying bottled water. That way I will be putting 150 less plastic bottles into landfills every month. Ouch!
I have also made my own laundry soap. To be fair, this was also an attempt to save money. I have read about it a lot and always thought I should do it, but I never took that first step. Well, on Tuesday I took that step. I bought Borax and Washing Soda at Kroger. I already had some Ivory soap at home that I was planning to use for this same purpose.
I found a dozen different recipes online, but only a couple for powdered laundry soap. I wanted to make powdered because it takes up less space and I didn't want to cook soap. I mean really, who does? The only drawback I saw was some people mentioned the powdered soap being bad for septic systems, which I have. I don't understand that though. It is all the same ingredients. The only difference is that I am dissolving the soap beforehand instead of after. I thought maybe people were using too much powder because that can make it difficult to dissolve. Whatev.. I like to live dangerously so I was making powdered laundry soap.
I took a cheese grater and started grating my Ivory soap into a bowl (I had the smaller bar, prob about 3 oz.). It didn't work out like I wanted. Apparently my soap was a little too moist to grate and it ended up smearing all over the cheese grater. Well, there goes that plan. I guess I am cooking soap after all.
I got out a paring knife and cut the rest of the soap bar into thin slices then put it in a pot with some hot water. I heated the water while stirring with the grater to get all the soap to dissolve (I stirred with the grater to get all the soap off it). Once the soap was dissolved I added 1/2 cup borax and 1/2 cup washing soda to the water and stirred until it was all dissolved. This all probably took about 10 minutes. Then I realized I didn't have a large sealable container to put the soap into. So I looked everywhere and found a milk jug, but it wasn't going to be enough. I put half my mixture into the milk jug anyway and then added water to finish filling the container. I shook it up to mix and set it aside. My husband brought me a bleach bottle that he had just emptied so I cleaned it out and put the rest of my mixture into it, added water and shook to mix. Done. I now have 2 gallons of laundry soap.
I let it sit for a day and then decided I should try it out on some dirty towels. I shook my milk jug to mix up the soap then measured out about 1/8 - 1/4 cup of soap. Probably closer to 1/4 cup because it was a full load. Now, I read that you can use white vinegar as a fabric softener and this was a guinea pig load. What the heck? I added some vinegar to my load.
The end result? I have clean towels. They smelled clean, but not like soap. Just clean. And I still had that Ahhhh.... Moment when I first pulled them out of the dryer. You know the one. Where you just want to lay all the hot towels on a bed and roll around in them. All in all I would say this was a success. Good thing too because I still have 2 gallons left to use and enough supplies to make about 100 gallons more.
Here's to saving the environment!
