Now for the homemade laundry detergent, dishwasher powder, and hand soap....

**Disclaimer: The laundry detergent recipe I found was on the Duggar Family website, and while I hear they are very nice Christian people, I don't want to give the impression that I know anything about them (we don't have cable TV so I don't watch their show). I'm also going to give links in this post to other websites that I found while researching homemade cleaners. I always try not to give links that lead to sites with offensive language or advertisements. Because most of my time on the computer happens with my children around I assume most of you are the same way, so I wanted it to be clear that I only looked at the recipe links that came up in my Google search, I didn't comb these sites for kid friendly material...so be careful! And sorry I'm such a freak-show for even writing this but I just wanted to remind everyone that you have to be careful everywhere you go online...I'm done now. LOL!

If you are trying to squeeze every last penny, like us, you are going to love this post! A couple of months ago I came upon THIS laundry soap recipe online and I decided to try it. I mentioned that I was planning to try it out at church the following Wednesday night and all of the other mamas got excited and wanted to do it too. So the next Wednesday night we brought all of the supplies we needed, and when we left church we were each carrying a five gallon bucket full of detergent! It was a very good lesson for our Keepers at Home girl's class with a bonus for us mamas! After using this stuff for over two months I can honestly say that I can't tell the difference in my clothes at all from expensive $15 a box stuff. I've talked to some of the other mamas and they say the same thing. Since I have a HE washer I get over 600 loads of clothes out of only one $2 batch of detergent. I think that's about as cheap as it gets! At first I worried that the clothes would smell kinda funky, but they really have a nice, clean, but not overly perfumed smell. Edited to add: I did do one small thing different from the instructions after we mixed up the first batch of detergent, I added the grated soap just a little at a time to the hot water and it dissolved much easier than adding it all at once and I had no lumps in my finished product. I also give my bottle a good shake before I use it everyday.

For my fabric softener I just diluted my regular Downy 1 part downy with 3 parts water and use it the same way I always have and the clothes smell the same. I have seen an improvement too, they don't have that sticky film that they used to have with the full strength stuff. You know what I'm talking about? It's like the towels and napkins don't soak up water as well when you use regular strength Downy, but now they smell nice without the film, and that's really nice. I also use vinegar instead of fabric softener for any loads that may be stinky (like work clothes) because vinegar kills the germs that cause the stink and softens clothes.

So after that little experiment I tried the homemade dishwasher powder that I found HERE. I looked at a lot of other recipes, but decided on this one because I had almost everything on-hand. I did add 1/2 cup of salt to the mix because on a lot of sites I read that the salt helps to sort of scrub the dishes (and I'm pretty bad about not rinsing them off first, because I don't get the point of washing dishes before I put them in the dishwasher, so I need all of the scrubbing power I can get). It worked great!

My next project will be liquid hand soap and liquid shower soap. I found pretty easy instructions for it HERE. From what I have read most places it looks like you can get about a 1/2 gallon of liquid soap out of 1 bar of soap. Some people even use the slivers of leftover soap left in the shower to make hand soap, now that's awesome! Kinda makes you feel like your getting something for nothing. I thought if the body wash works out I will try to add some moisturizer to it too. I should add that I did try one of the hand soap recipes that included borax but that was a big mistake, my hands did not like that recipe at all! Soap and water is all you should need. Don't put borax in any soaps that will have to touch your skin, it's a pretty heavy duty cleaner and shouldn't be used on skin ever. Lesson learned.

So for the last few weeks I've been thinking about all of the expensive things that we think we have to buy that we could make for lots less, and wondering if there are more things that I could do to save money....It really adds up when you think about it all. We already do a lot of money saving things like making our own bread, using cloth napkins, using real cups and plates, we buy 1/2 of a cow once a year from a local farmer (it's cheaper and the meat is so much better), we grow our own food in the Summer and put away for Winter, we have fresh eggs from our chickens, and we heat our home with our wood burning stove...Please share your ideas! What are some ways that you have cut the cost of living? And if you have a recipe to add please share it in the comments section! We would love to give it a try! I also found THIS SITE in my research, I'm going to try a few of these things too. Hope you have learned something today!