Tuesday, November 29, 2011

DIY Laundry Detergent - The Winner!

Good Tuesday morning!  and it is a beautiful one, bright sun shining and very crisp and cold.

I did my normal early morning house chores, made the bed, folded some laundry, put fresh sheets on a guest bed, and tidied up the kitchen.

Over Thanksgiving I had laid out an extra pie crust to thaw in case we wanted a different pie....didn't have to use it so I made jam pasties this morning.  I never know what to call them, but Cindy over on Chickens in the Road posted her pastie recipe with meat filling and I thought they looked like my little ones with jam....so jam pasties they are!

I had a jar of over-processed peach jam where I had cooked down the sugar and peaches  with no added pectin and I overdid it on the cooking.  I thought this would be a good use of the jam and it was. I just roll out the crust pretty thin and use a can for the cutter.  I put a dollop of jam in the center, brush edges with water, fold over, crimp with a fork and sprinkle the tops with raw sugar.  I baked them at 400° for 15 minutes and they were done perfectly.



DIY Laundry Detergent

OK, so the real purpose of this post is to tell you about the laundry detergent.  I have thus far tried two or more DIY recipes, one liquid and we were never happy with how our clothes came out.  Now you must factor in that we are active farmers and we get some serious dirt both animal and mineral on our clothes and I am a messy cook and wipe my hands frequently on my aprons (but not my pink one!) which leaves greasy spots.  These never came out with the other trial soaps.

I found this one on Keeping a Family Cow forum .
It was originally posted by Mountainmama and the founder of the forum had made it and was very pleased with the results.

I had everything already on hand except the Oxyclean from my previous trials.
My husband does our laundry and it the resident expert on all things involved with keeping our clothes clean.  I defer to him on all things laundry and he is happy with this one.

Recipe:


2 bars grated Fels-Naptha
2 cups baking soda
3 cups washing soda
3 cups Borax powder
1 cup Oxyclean (buy the generic one; I bought Sun Oxygen cleaner at Wal Mart)


Use 1-1/2 Tablespoons for normal load and 2 Tablespoons for very dirty clothes.  We just use the scoop that came in the Oxyclean.

The added plus is the clothes feel like you have used a rinse, very fluffy and they have a nice clean smell.  We have very hard water and so far this has worked equally well as Tide w/bleach which is all we would use up to this point.

I just read that  Oxyclean is the bleach product in Tide!  No wonder it works so well.  I think it was the addition of it that made this one DIY one work.

I will give a report on the new Oat Bread Cockaigne that I made yesterday tomorrow...
and using coconut oil.

6 comments:

  1. Glenda - the soap sounds like a winner. When you say 1 1/2T or 2T of soap for laundry, are you using like a measuring spoon and then leveled off like you would for flour in a recipe? Or are you using a scooped up (mounded) tablespoon? How many loads do you suppose the formula you listed would do? I'm very temped to make up a batch if I can find all the ingredients.

    Those jammy delights look delish! YUM

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  2. Glenda, I can't remember -- do you have a front loader or a top loader? I'll try this recipe too, since past efforts didn't hit the animal dirt well enough for us either... but I'm concerned about how fine I would have to get the Fels Naptha soap grated to make sure that it's fully dissolved in the front load machine. Not a lot of agitation to get things into solution, you know? I don't have/don't want a food processor, and can just see myself running bars of soap over a microplane grater for the next 3 days! ;) And don't suggest I pre-dissolve the laundry soap, we'd NEVER get the laundry done! ;)

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  3. Glenda, those look scrumptious, sweetheart! And the soap powder...would it be effective in a front loader that uses minimal water?...:)JP

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  4. Glenda, I'll give this a try. I'm actually boosting my normal soap recipe with the water / vinegar / peroxide solution found on another blog, that I;ve mentioned before, and I think that works pretty well. I do have a question about the dry mix though. I've done dry mixes before and I find that the grated Fels Naptha doesn;t seem to blend uniformly with the other ingredients. Do you do anything special to make this work better? I'd sure rather use the dry than the wet, because the wet lumps up.

    I still haven't gotten that email you said you sent me. I wonder where it went?

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  5. Hi Glenda, those jam pasties look scrumptious! I might have to try that soap recipe, the 3 of us go through a lot of Tide!

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  6. Okay, on my detergent recipe, it did not call for Oxyclean. I wonder if that is why the greasy/dirty husband's work clothes don't come clean? Jam pasties look yummy. Could a person just use the jam that comes in a jar? Store bought jam?

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