Happy New Year! Now, let's do some laundry!

Hope everyone all had a great New Year's Eve and that your 2013 is off to a great start!  We actually stayed up last night until just after midnight -- not something originally planned, but Lisa wasn't feeling well so she and Andrew didn't attend the New Year's Eve party they had planned to.  Instead, we all stayed up and played two classic games: Stratego and Risk!  Woke up to 14 degrees and active snowing this morning.

Now on to the latest great new project.  I happened along a great new (old) recipe for homemade laundry soap posted on the "One Good Thing With Jillee" Blog.  She says this particular recipe (she has several different varieties on her site) should last a full year (maybe in her house, but I don't know about ours since we do a lot of laundry!)  And the cost?  just $30.00!  We're in! If it works well, and even if it only lasts 6 months it's worth it.

So the search for ingredients is on!  After initially looking on line and pricing everything out we found that it would cost us nearly $50 for everything we need!  Far more than Jillie's $30 budget.  Our plan never called for us buying the ingredients on-line anyway, but now we were worried since we didn't know if we could find everything we needed locally.  As it turned out we need not have worried since we DID find everything in our local stores and the final bill came in at just $26.41 !  Another testament to supporting local businesses by shopping local whenever you can!

So here it is, all the ingredients ready to be mixed: Borax, Washing Soda, Fabric Softener, Baking Soda, Oxi-Clean, and Fels-Naptha.

About the only work you need to do is to grate the Fels-Naptha bars. (and the knuckle on my thumb was just about healed from a grater accident while making Christmas Cookies!)

Next, just add the ingredients to the container.  We found that it easy to mix the batch thoroughly by adding a little of each of the ingredients at a time and stirring as we went.  It Does help the overall process if you smile like our model is doing!

Here's the finished product!

And now, on to the washer.  Instructions call for 2 tablespoons per load and we just happened to have a load (or four) of laundry we could try it out on.  Early results?  So far so good!

Our plan now is to tape a sheet of paper to the laundry room cabinet so we can tally each load.  This way we can know for sure how many loads one batch makes. (Yes, we could do the math and figure it out immediately, but our tally method just seems like more fun.)  As well, we'll update how well the soap works on a variety of laundry -- and we do have a good variety with Mom, Dad, a high school athlete and a veterinary technician who works with cows and other livestock on a regular basis!

And all that entertainment and laundry for just $26.41!