Homemade Laundry Detergent

 I decided to make my own laundry detergent a couple of weeks ago. I used this recipe. The Duggar Family - Duggar Recipes :: Homemade Liquid Laundry Soap- Front or top load machine- best value   My Walmart has all of these ingredients, although I bought my washing soda from alice.com because it was only $2.99 a box. As I was researching homemade laundry detergent I gathered that you have to play around with it and see what works best for you (and what kind of water you have).  I used a bar of Ivory soap instead of Fels-Naptha. I ended up adding 1 cup of borax instead of 1/2 cup. I also just left it in the 5 gallon bucket instead filling up an old laundry detergent container half way with the detergent and the other half with water.  This costs $1.33 to make 5 gallons. 5 gallons gets me 80 loads. That's about 1.5 cents per load. It seems to work pretty well.  It doesn't get tough stains out, (grease, blood, deoderant stains) you have to pretreat those stains. Also, my whites don't come out as white as I would like, but I've been searching for the perfect solution to that for a long time. I put a cup of baking soda directly into the drum with the clothes, put a cup of my detergent into the detergent cup, and put vinegar in the fabric softener cup (which works great and is so much less expensive than fabric softener).  My conclusion is that it works just as well as the middle priced laundry detergents that I was using, so this is what I'm going to continue using from now on. Here is what it looks like.