Homemade Laundry Soap

Home Made Laundry Soap Concentrate

I have been making my own Homemade Laundry Soap scented with essential oils for four years now. I have tweaked the recipe to my liking and have made a few adjustments.

My Basic Recipe is

4 0r 5.5 oz bar of soap grated

1 Cup of Washing Soda

1 Cup of Borax (optional some fear the use of this)

5 gallon bucket with Gamma Lid

Water

About the ingredients:

WASHING SODA not Baking SodaTwenty Mule Team Natural Laundry Booster & Multi-Purpose Cleaner-76 oz.

Washing soda not baking soda. Borax is a great cleaner. Borax is natural but it never degrades so we use it and it seems to dissolve but really it is still there and settles out again and may not necessarily be back into your tap water but remains built up somewhere in the environment.

  

5 gallon bucket and Gamma Lid. These Gamma lids have a rim that permanently fits on the bucket and a screw top lid insert that seals tight but allows you to open the bucket whenever you want easily! Great for food storage too.

For the SOAP:  I prefer to use Plain Castile Soap that I usually order from

Virginia Soaps & Scents it is their Cleaning Bar 8 oz for $4.95 found in the Laundry section. I use 1/2 of the 8 oz bar for a recipe.

I buy the 8 oz bar not the already grated soap. The 8 oz bar makes 2 large 5 gallon buckets of concentrated laundry soap.

Or I like the All Natural SFIC Castile Melt and Pour Soap Base: From Bulk Apothecary. This I measure and use 4 to 5 oz. per recipe.

Fels-Naptha Soap

But I have several bars of the Fels-Naptha soap so I use that every other batch or when I am out of the Castile soap.

Some people have used

Dr. Bronner’s Organic Pure Castile Peppermint Soap, 5 Ounces

Dr. Bronner’s Organic Pure Castile Peppermint Soap, 5 Ounces. However this would make wonderful Laundry Soap but would not be quite as cost effective.

Now the for the tutorial…

1. Grate the soap:

Grate the Fels-Nappa Soap

Grate the soap. I use a cheese grater. Cleans up nicely with water.

Grate the soap. Looks like cheese doesn’t it. It even does in person. Once I was getting ready to make soap and had to stop and make dinner. I left the plate of grated soap sitting on the counter and my husband almost put it on his taco. He said this cheese is really hard when he started to pick it up. It looks like curly grated cheese but when you touch it it is much stiffer than cheese.

2. Put grated soap into small saucepan and cover with warm water.

Okay so I did not put it on the stove and start to melt it right away. Instead I got busy doing something else and then 4 hours later it had all dissolved into a globby mess.

3.Now your will not necessarily look like the above picture but put it on the stove and while stirring constantly melt it over med heat.

close up before heated.

Melted soap.

Melted soap ready for next step.

4. Add hot melted soap that was in the saucepan with water to the bucket add the washing soda and borax and about two or three saucepans full of the hottest tap water you can get from your tap.

Melted soap, Borax and washing soda with more hot water. Stir well.

5. Add more hot tap water to 4″ below rim of bucket.

Add water to almost fill bucket leave three to 4 inches head space.

Fill bucket with hot or warm tap water.

Stir with wooden spoon.

Suds beginning to settle.

Here you can begin to see the soap below the suds.

The consistency is very runny.

I just leave this plastic measuring cup in the bucket all the time.

Close the lid and wait overnight.

6. Close the lid and wait overnight.

Next morning the science experiment emerges.

7. the next morning you will open the bucket to find it has turned to a weird jell consistency.

turns somewhat more runny upon stirring still with chunky jell like globs. This is how it is supposed to be.

You have to stir it around a little with the scoop or measuring cup every time you want to fill a jug.

8. I fill an old Tide jug 2/3 full of the concentrate goo. The best way is to put the jug over the bucket and stuff the goo into the opening as best you can by pouring it from the measuring cup. It gets all down the sides but I just wipe it off with a dirty towel and throw that towel in a load of wash.

9. Then I fill the jug with water. You must shake the jug before pouring the detergent into the cap. I use a half a cap in my front loading washing machines. (I have two washers and two dryers, another post)

10. Now for the clincher. It has no optic brightener in the formula. So some whites get really grey and dingy after a while. I imagine our colors are less bright to but it is not as noticeable as the whites. The most noticeable is the underwear. And the more polyester in the fabric the quicker the greying takes place.  I really couldn’t get a good picture of the towels, white shirts to show the difference and sorry I am not photographing any underwear. My solution is a laundry booster that is mostly brighteners. Want to know how much brighteners are in your commercial laundry detergent (I wager they are in most all laundry products especially detergents and carpet cleaners and spot cleaners) Just pour into a cup and hold a black light on it for a cool affect turn off the light in the laundry room and shine a black light around you can see where you spilled laundry soap.

Says it is color safe bleach but contains no bleach and just glows under the black light.

Now if Natural is what you are going for then your whites will not be white after awhile. I have refrained from adding this to the bucket of laundry detergent concentrate because it is so chemical laden probably the only natural ingredient in the stuff is the water (and that is debatable on the water’s naturalness) Anyways I just use it on my whites.

Note that we have super hard water here too which does not help the white situation.

You may use the Laundry concentrate at 1/2 detergent and 1/2 water also. I range between 2/3 to 1/2 water.

We still buy Wisk Laundry detergent for my son’s work uniform he works in the parts department of a car dealer and his uniform gets some transfer grease from the mechanics who come in and out of the parts department. And my daughter works at a fast food restaurant and she has to use the Wisk too because of the grease factor. I am not sure what ingredient is in the Wisk that is lacking in the homemade laundry detergent to solve this. But all the rest of our laundry seems to get clean just fine with the homemade stuff.

11. I like to add 1/4 oz or so of essential oils to the jug of laundry detergent.

My favorite combos are

Lemongrass, Lavender

Orange, Lavender

Tea Tree, and any of the above

Peppermint & Lemon

 

Happy Crafting and Happy Laundry!

Lisa

 

 

 

 

How to Make a Scrabble Magnet Message Board

I was inspired by Twice Remembered Cottage’s Magnet Board which I first saw on Pinterest. We love to play Scrabble around here well let me say I love to play scrabble. 
It is hard to get others to play with me and super hard to play last few years with my barely three year old around who likes to upset the game when we are well into it. 
I thought this board would be perfect to hang on the wall where DS age 3 could not reach it and where we could have a perpetual game going all the time. I ended up having to limit each person to one word a day. 

I put a twist on mine by decoupaging a scanned scrabble board to the front so we could play an ongoing game. 
First I purchased the Sheet Metal from Lowe’s. It was about $12. Online it says it is $8.94. But at our Lowe’s I know it was more than that.  
And we just got door frame molding and little corner wood rosettes so we did not have to do miter cuts. We have a miter saw and can certainly do miter cuts but this was easier and cleaner edges. The molding was already primed white. 

First we glued with Liquid Nails the metal to a piece of Masonite we already had. Personally next time I would use 1/2″ plywood because it warped a little. 
  after putting the glue on my DH put a bunch of heavy objects from the garage on top of it and let it dry overnight. 

Next I selected pages from a 1920’s Dictionary I just knew I was saving for a great project!!!



 Then I Decoupaged them to the sheet metal. 
  Okay note here I am not the best decoupager (is that a word?)
I always have bumps and bubbles this process took forever to get the worst of the bubbles out. I especially have this problem when I decoupage with antique papers. They have a tendency to absorb the glue and tear super easy and then ripple as they dry. It is really difficult. Most of the time when I use actual vintage papers I coat them with decoupage and let them dry because then the tend to tear less. However these were super thin pages and I did not want to wait. So I spent what seemed to be hours smoothing re-smoothing carefully without tearing. And it still was a little bumpy and had a few bubbles. My remedy for that is several coats of varnish. It just added charm to it. You can tell it is real vintage paper. 



You can see in the Dictionary picture above that I painted the trim molding with black acrylic craft paint. then I distressed a little with sandpaper to let a little of the white show though. Then I varnished it with the same sparkly varnish I will tell you about below. So this molding was liquid nails glued onto the board and clamped overnight. 

Then came the hardest part to get the Scrabble board on the board so the Magnets would still stick. 

My scanner is legal size so I had to scan and rescan I even cut a board up and scanned it to get rid of any shadow and distortion. I did Photoshop the images a little cuz my 1945 board was more grey than I liked.  I then cut scanned images up and pieced them back together like a puzzle. 
Now the dictionary pages had a good 2 coats of decoupage and varnish on them you can see the shine in the picture. So I was able to put the board on and if I didn’t like it after it before it dried completely I could peel it of and start over. I did this a few times till I got it how I wanted it. 
You really cannot see the seams on the finished board. A little Tim Holtz antiquing stamp rubbed on it and coats and coats of varnish and it is all great. 
Below is the Sparkle Varnish from Micheal’s I love this stuff. I am not sure the camera does it justice. It is subtle. I use it on everything. It does not give a great shinny protective coat so I usually use Minwax acyclic gloss coat over it. 

 

Well that is it here’s the finished board.

Right now it is just leaned against the wall and propped up on top of my decoupaged desk, sometime I may just screw it directly to the wall. 

Well hope this helped you if you want to make your own. Feel free to comment or question. 

Also I will share my scans for you if you want to make one. 

so check back. 
  a few tricks… I sprayed the scanned image with an art fixative before decoupaging it. Helped it from smearing when I was smoothing the bubbles out. Still had issues with the pink bleeding. Clear spray varnish (cheap stuff) worked better. 

When gluing the Earth Magnets on the “craft” super glue was a little runny it worked but the magnets are super strong and hard to work with if the tiles were close together they would “jump” together or drift to the corners of the tiles. I preferred the Gel glue. 

I got the earth magnets from eBay. I ended up getting the 1/4″ x 1/16″ rare earth magnets.

Here are the first set of scrabble board scans…
Page 1
 Page 2 
Page 3
Page 4

Happy Crafting and Decorating
Love,
Lisa

Launch of The Watermelon Stand Blog

Welcome to the Watermelon Stand Blog!!! We here at the Watermelon Stand are excited to share our Blog with  you. We have had many projects going on here..
We recently have been sewing up some printed Bunting Flag Banners. 

These banners were printed on the computer!!! We used Bubble Jet 2000  to set the ink into the fabric.
This has been really fun being able to print on fabric!
We have printed on Pillows and towels!!