Easiest Homemade Liquid Laundry Detergent

I've been making my own laundry detergent for about a year now and I love it. Works great, can tailor the scent to exactly what I like, and it's cheap. And recipe I have using isn't terribly hard, but it yields 5 gallons at a time! Do you know how much that weighs? It's over 40lbs and now that I'm expecting again, I'm not lugging 40+ pounds of detergent from the kitchen down to the utility room.

So, I made some calculations and adapted the original recipe I used, to one that's even easier to assemble and only yields 1 gallon at a time.

Here is the original beastly recipe:

• 1 bar castile soap, grated
  

• 1 cup washing soda

• 1 cup borax

• 35-40 drops essential oil(s)
  

• 5 gallons of water
  

Melt the grated soap in about 1 cup of water. In a 5 gallon bucket combine melted soap, washing soda, and borax, slowly adding water while mixing. Let sit overnight and re-mix as it will have settled. Use ~1 cup per load of laundry.

Not that tricky really, though the grating and melting of bar soap was a bit cumbersome. But they make LIQUID castile soap and I thought, wouldn't that be about 10 times easier to use than grating and melting bar soap into a liquid? It is a little bit more price wise for the liquid than the bars, but to me it's worth saving the time and effort.

There's a handy little blog post comparing and contrasting the difference of Dr. Bronner's bar and liquid castile soaps and the break down of soap content (1 bar roughly equals a heaping 1.5 cups of liquid soap).

So now, here it is the Easiest Homemade Liquid Laundry Detergent!

• 1/3 cup liquid castile soap
  

• 3 tbsp washing soda

• 3 tbsp borax

• 8-9 drops essential oil(s) - I use 9 drops of Young Living's Thieves EO blend
  

• 1 gallon of water
  

Add powder ingredients to container (in my case, old apple juice bottles). Add ~1 cup warm water, shake gently until powder is completely dissolved. Add the castile soap, fill about 75% of the way with water. Add in essential oils, shake gently to incorporate, top off with water. Use ~1 cup per load of laundry (I typically eye ball it, and it's probably less than 1 cup use, more like 3/4 of a cup).

Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.