This Laundry Soap Rocks!

It's one thing to create a great product. And it's another to know it works most of the time. Part of my "let's get something accomplished today" schtick was laundry. It wasn't even altruistic laundry; it was selfish laundry. Simply put, I was out of black socks and my favorite dark blue jeans were dirty.

The other night, one of our cats had gotten spooked by a loud noise and, being the very vocal calico that she is, spent the next few hours making us aware of her displeasure. (Yes, I'm going somewhere with this.) Hubby was quite impressed that she was able to hiss and eat at the same time. Finally I went outside and found some freeze-dried catnip in the pot on the porch. Ahhhhh... Stoned cats don't growl, hiss or scream, so quiet returned. Well, when one cat's in a crabby mood, the other picks up on it, so the other cat was also letting us know how upset she was that her sister was in a, well, catty mood. Unfortunately, that cat prefers expressing her displeasure by peeing on clothes, namely mine. The victims this time were a dress and my red satin, fleece-lined VS bathrobe.

Now my point... The red robe went in with the darks, and instead of using the All liquid that hubby had bought while we were waiting for soap to dry out, I dumped all the rest of the first batch of homemade laundry soap into the machine (barely eking out the 2 tablespoons needed). He says the true test of how good the stuff is is how well it gets his nastiest work uniforms clean (so far so good). I put it up against cat pee, and when I moved the laundry from the washing machine to the dryer, there wasn't the least little hint of cat pee. It really, really worked!

Finally my shreds from the soap I'd made for laundry last week had dried out enough that I could grind them to powder. That soap will get a body clean, but it has no skin-conditioning properties at all. Anyway, I did my 2 parts soap to 1 part washing soda to 1 part Borax, and it's great. I had wanted to add a bit of essential oil, but all the ones I'd want to use I can't right now, so I just left it unscented. The mixture (using just 3 bars of soap) made 4 cups of laundry soap - very natural, very environmentally friendly laundry soap. The beautiful part is, I've still got 5 bars of that soap leftover, along with some excess powdered soap from today's batch. Each full load only uses 2 tablespoons of the mixture, so figure 2 tablespoons per ounce, and 4 cups is equal to approximately 32 ounces, so for maybe $2.00 or so, I've got soap to do 32 loads of laundry upstairs right now, ready to go. I'm so excited, because this is a little way I get to use my talent and savvy to save my family some beaucoups bucks over the course of a year, and do my part to help preserve our natural resources.