I think we've all seen a few posts about making homemade laundry soap, but I've tried to gather together the best ingredients for the soap so that are both A. getting a good value and B. making sure our laundry is clean without the soap buildup from this type of homemade product.
Ingredients:
1 55 oz box of Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda. 1 4 lbs box of Arm and Hammer Baking Soda. 1 76 oz box of Borax. 2 400 g bars of Zote Soap(or 3 bars of Fels Naptha Soap, or a natural soap of your choice, such as Dr. Bronner's)
Cheese grater (for grating the soap bars) 1 3 lbs box of Oxiclean
White Vinegar (for when you actually do your laundry)
Medium sized storage container
Combine the Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda, Baking Soda, Borax, and Oxiclean in a large container. I used a medium sized storage tub that I wasn't using.
The only hard part is grating the soap. You'll have to use the cheese grater to grate it up and mix it in with the mix.
You can use two tablespoonfuls of this with your laundry.
If you have a front loader, you will have to mix it in with your laundry instead of adding it to the top detergent loading area.
Add 1/2 cup of white vinegar to the mix when doing laundry to your detergent loading area, to act as a laundry detergent.
Since this is actually using a tallow based soap, (which will collect on your clothing fibers) you need some sort of detergent agent to aid in your wash. Vinegar is a quick, effective, and cheap detergent. It won't smell later because you have added soap as well.
Use wool dryer balls to dry your laundry. You can add a few essential oils to the dryer balls to give a nice, low-key clean scent.
I recommend running an empty cycle of hot water with 2 cups white distilled vinegar to give your machine a good clean every 2-3 months, especially when using this laundry detergent. This is to help with any soap scum buildup in your machine.
Here are also a couple of links to healthy laundry detergents, which are kind of hard to find:
I recommend the unscented varieties because even when labeled with fragrance from essential oils, I've definitely gotten laundry detergent that smelled incredibly fake, and probably had fragrance oils added somewhere down the supply chain.