Clear Dye Free Homemade Laundry Detergent

I know a lot of you have seen the recipes for homemade laundry detergent. Recently, I came across one that uses Dawn dish liquid. In this recipe there is no need to shave down the bar soap and melt it on the stove. While talking with my sister, she mentioned that she would like to try to make her own homemade detergent. However, she usually buys the clear detergent at the store. But, on her last visit they had raised the price by a few dollars. So, I came up with this recipe for my sensitive-skinned sister ;) This recipe uses Dawn Pure Essentials Dye Free Hypoallergenic Dish Liquid instead of the Original Blue Dawn.

Recipe: 1/2 cup Borax, 1/2 cup Super Washing Soda, 1/2 cup Dawn Pure Essentials Dye Free Dish Liquid, Water

I just used a large plastic orange juice jug that I had washed out, to make and store this in. (You can use any plastic jug up to 1 gallon size.)
First, fill the jug about 2/3 of the way to the top with warm water. Then, add the Borax and Super Washing powders to the water using a funnel. Close the top of the jug and shake to dissolve the powders. After the powders have dissolved you can add in the Dawn dish liquid and fill the jug the rest of the way to the top leaving a little room to shake and mix in the Dawn. I suggest adding the Dawn at the end. If you try to add everything to the bottle first and then fill with water, the dish soap will foam up and you will have a jug full of bubbles spilling out of the top as you are trying to fill the jug with water. I left this just sit on the counter overnight and then tried it the next morning. In my mind, I thought it would be watery like dish water but to my surprise it was thick and resembled the consistency of liquid laundry detergent you would buy in the store. I threw a cup in the washer and it worked fine.

The only stain remover that worked!

My son is about to turn 4 years old. The other day he was eating a meatball sub with this white shirt on. Boys being boys, he dripped some of the tomato sauce down the front of the shirt and also managed to get some over on the shoulder. I looked online and found endless recipes for homemade stain removers. So, I tried a few on this shirt. I tried vinegar & dish soap; vinegar & baking soda, homemade laundry detergent (fels-naptha) and Mean Green Degreaser. None of them really seemed to make any difference to the stain. Then I remembered that I had some Clorox Bleach Gel in the cabinet. I put a small dot of bleach gel on each stained area and let it sit for about 3 minutes. I rinsed the shirt out and the stains had disappeared! So I guess it's true, nothing works quite like good old fashioned Clorox Bleach. Now obviously you could not do this on a colored shirt. So next time I am going to test out Colorox 2 Color Safe Bleach and see if it has the same effect.

Let me introduce myself...

Hello, my name is Shannon. I am a 34 year old mother of 3. My children are ages 14, 4 and 2. I am originally from Darlington, Maryland and now I live in Ennice, North Carolina. I find that a lot of people like myself are struggling in these poor economic times. We live paycheck to paycheck here in our house. I need to pinch every penny and save money where ever I can in order to provide for my children. I wanted to start this blog to share with you some of the ways I have found to save money. I will share tips, tricks, recipes and product reviews that I think will help your family save money too.