Homemade Laundry Detergent

Ran out of laundry detergent the other day and Josh and I thought, why don't we see if we can make our own. Looked at many blogs because we need a hypoallergenic/dye free/fragrance free detergent or else my skin will break out in big itchy hives. There are many stories about this happening (to prove that I am not a hypochondriac) but will spare the details for more personal settings over coffee.

So we sat outside the other day and grated 2 bars of ivory soap, various blogs online said that you can use any kind of soap that you have on hand or if you want to be fancy or have nicer clothes than us you could use a laundry soap bar. Normal cheese grater will do, and yes the soap will come off it, ask my husband if you don't believe me who said "Patricia, you put soap on the dishes when you put them in the dishwasher." Thanks Josh.
All you need is soap, a box of Borax and a box of washing soda. I could find all of these things at the grocery store. 3 bucks a pop= 9 total.

1 C Borax
1 C washing soda
2 C grated soap flakes (2 ivory bars)

shake it all together in a container with a lid. 2 tbsp per load. I have an HE washer and it works fine. If you're used to using liquid detergent there are recipes for that online too, its basically the same but you boil the mix together and use a cup per load (i think). But you'd need a big bucket to store this in because if makes quite a quantity (yes all that money saving!). If you're not used to dry detergent but want to give it a go, just make sure you put it in before your clothes and don't worry if the soap flakes don't dissolve right away.

We also use BunGenius cloth diapers for Anniebean and apparently there is a different recipe for that (because the regular soap has things in it that make the diapers repel liquid and man that wouldn't be good).
Here's the alternative recipe for the diapers (which works SO well!) I will never go back to buying seventh generation/ecos again!

1 C borax
1 C washing soda
1 C oxygen cleaner (such as Sun or Oxyclean= i used Sun because it costs half the price and worked great!)