I've been needing to make more laundry soap, have all the supplies and a few minutes this morning. In this photo I've been combining the lye/water solution with the Coconut Oil and d-Limonene.
My initial soap recipe uses 100% Coconut Oil at a 0% super fat for extreme cleaning power. I used SoapCalc to formulate my recipe, it will give you the correct weights in ounces or grams to make your recipe and it also tells you how cleansing, conditioning, bubblie, hard your soap will be. If you are making your own soaps and/or laundry soap please use a lye calculator.
The soap batter has reached a nice trace and I've poured it into my 2 lb. acrylic mold and had a little more than I'd planned so I grabbed my guest size mold. Who knows maybe they'll be samples? Not for bathing though, dishes? Dishes with gloves, a 0% super fat with 100% Coconut Oil would be super drying on our skin!
An up close of the soap in the molds. There are a few more steps to laundry soap, in about 24 hours I can un-mold my soap, cut it and grate it using my Salad Shooter, then I'll add other powdered ingredients like washing soda, borax, etc.
I really like my own laundry detergent, this 2 pound brick of soap can make A LOT of laundry detergent.
In formulating my recipe I went for cleaning power and that's also why I added the d-Limonene.
d-Limonene is reported to be a powerhouse of a natural cleaner.
Here's what the Green Terpene website says about their product: GreenTerpene™ d-Limonene "Orange Terpenes" Food Grade All-purpose cleaner cuts grease, grime and dirt with ease! Our d'Limonene is extracted from Florida Orange Oil. Its 100% natural, biodegradable, safe, and non-toxic. Contains over 95% d-Limonene.
I've had a hard time getting the d-Limonene here, it ships from Florida and the first try came by USPS, the empty box sure did smell good...
Green Terpene's customer service is excellent, I let them know what happened along with photos. They shipped out a new product via UPS for me. It took awhile to arrive and I'm excited to see how it preforms in my laundry soap experiment!
This Coconut Oil soap was ready to un-mold and hard very quickly. I cut it into chunks so I could put it through the Salad Shooter.
Shredding soap with the Salad Shooter.
View from the bucket...
I ended up with a bucket full of shredded soap, next I poured it out onto large baking sheets to dry out for about 48 hours.
The next step of the process is putting it all together. I did put the shredded soap through my food processor so I had a course powder to mix with the other ingredients. The end result is about a 6 month supply of laundry soap for $20.95. I used an up-cycled kitty litter container for storage and a coffee can full for everyday use.
If you'd like to make homemade laundry soap here's a link to the original recipe.
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