Laundry soap experiment

Lately I've been playing around with the idea of making laundry soap, for several reasons. One, it would be something less harsh to wash my family's clothing with. Two, it's cheaper than the laundry soap we can buy here. And three, it just looked like fun! So when we ran out of powdered laundry soap yesterday, well, necessity provoked some invention.

Most of the recipes I found online called for a bar of plain soap, borax, and washing soda. I did find one recipe without borax, and that was good because I can't buy borax here.

So I shredded a bar of soap into a saucepan and melted it with a little water. Then I poured that into a bucket with 2.5 gallons of hot water.

Then stirred in a cup of washing soda. Actually, all I could find was a laundry treatment powder made of 1/2 sodium carbonate (which is the "washing soda") and 1/2 sodium percarbonate, thinking that it wouldn't make much difference. Would it?

The recipe said to set it aside to cool. Which I did. And the stuff just kept foaming up... and UP...

...and UP SOME MORE.

Perhaps that sodium percarbonate made it do that, because none of the recipes I saw said anything about the soap foaming up.

Anyhow, what we ended up with was a nice liquid gel laundry soap with a foamy head. We stir it up, then use 1/2 cup of it per load, or a little more for particularly dirty loads. It works great, and smells so fresh!