Laundry soap

I enjoy doing laundry these days - and I cannot believe that I am writing that.  It is true though, I enjoy the snap that wet clothes make, I like seeing all the clean clothes on the drying racks, and I like folding them into stacks by person.  (Meri thinks that she is also the biggest laundry helper in the world as she puts all of the socks on the lower levels of the racks - super cute.) I try to follow the flylady idea of doing a load a day and if I do that, I can usually line dry everything.  I love the feel of crisp clothes right off the rack and it is a nice way to add a little moisture back into the dry winter air.

Meredith is "helping" with laundry by unfolding the folded stack of kitchen towels and laying them neatly on the couch.

Since, I do laundry everyday, and I hang and fold clothes everyday, I have a bit of time to think about the process.  I have thought about how strong the laundry detergent smells and I don't really like strong smells.

I've also had a chance to try the old-fashioned method of soaking my laundry to see if it actually gets things cleaner - you know what - it does.  For now, I soak two types of laundry - Meredith's diapers and Ryan's shirts each get overnight soaks in the washer and then I just launder them as usual and they get really clean without any extra work.

I fell for the marketing a while back and bought a big container of the "baby" laundry detergent before Meri was born.  That was over 2 years ago now.

We used regular liquid laundry soap from Costco until it was gone and then I started using the baby laundry soap for all of our clothes to try to use it up.  I would say we are still several months away from using it all up.

In the meantime, I also tried making my own laundry soap powder using Rhonda's recipe. I started using it intermittently with the baby soap for our clothes - just to make sure that we don't have any allergies to it before it is all we have.  So far, it is working really well.

My homemade laundry soap

It was super simple to make the powder.  I grated a couple of bars of soap - I actually shredded them in the magic bullet, but I wouldn't recommend that because it took a really long time. Then I measured the amount of soap flakes I had and divided that amount in two to get the correct ratio of borax and washing soda.  So I had 2 1/2 cups of soap powder, and added 1 1/4 cups of borax and 1 1/4 cups of washing soda to the container and gave it a good stir.  According to Rhonda, I should only need about 2 tablespoons per load of laundry.  However, I found that 2T is actually a bit much and 1 heaping tablespoon is working well for this batch of laundry powder.

For Meredith's diapers, I use plain Tide.  Since it is recommended by the diaper manufacturers and it does not give Meredith any trouble, I am going to keep on keeping on with that.