Make your own laundry detergent
I love doing things like making my own laundry detergent. It's quick, easy, economical, and it works great. What's not to like?
3 ingredients plus one more for rinse cycle:
1 bar of Fels Naptha soap, grated, grated the way you'd grate a potato
1 cup of Borax
1 cup of Washing Soda
Mix together. Use 1 tablespoon for a normal load.
Add white vinegar at rinse cycle.
A lady who lives in my apartment was a minister's wife and knew how to economize and to feel good about what she was doing. She gave me this formula. She said this costs about 4 cents a load.
Not only that, in my experience, this gets clothes as clean as any other laundry detergent.
Sorry, detergent companies, you're going out of business!
P.S. That reminds me. I used to use Ivory Flakes when my daughter was little. I liked it very much. I believed it was 99.9% pure. Where are ivory Flakes now?
Comments
Thanks for the recipe - very thrifty!
Did you mean nifty!
I remember my mother using a wire basket on a long handle that held a bar of soap, probably Ivory, but maybe Fels. You dunked it into a sink or pan full of hot water and swished it vigorously back and forth until you worked up suds for washing dishes. If I remember right, a bar of Ivory soap would float in water. Also if I remember right, you could write on windows with a wet bar of Fels. The daytime serial dramas on radio were called soap operas because many were sponsered by soap makers. Only now are the last of those being canceled and I think they are still often called "soaps".
These memories are so sweet! And that's why soap operas are called soap operas. Do you mean that soap operas are going off the air? My mother loved them. I guess I did too at one point.
Soap operas have been increasingly canceled lately because not enough people watch them any more. I don't know what's left except a much different world. If I remember right one of the ones on television was called As The World Turns which is a good title for this big soap opera that we live in.
Senora, that's a great formula! I bet a teaspoonful of my home made tooth-powder added to the wash cycle would give it added power.
So that's why they're called soaps! My mother also loved them. Her favorites were Days of our Lives and The Bold and the Beautiful. I used to watch a bit of Dallas.
In South America and South Africa soapies still get prime time slots.
The way Charles describes his mother washing dishes is pretty much how I washed my clothes today. I waited for the sun to get high up (because it's really cold in this part of the world) and then I took my tub outside, which had the clothes soaking from last night in suddy soap (the green block type) water, sat down on a step and hand washed them. It felt good. Now they're drying on the clothes line and I'm wondering if they'll be frozen in the morning?