The Touch, The Feel of Cotton. It's what's in my washing machine.

Today's story is about my recent homemade laundry detergent trial. We wash a lot of clothes. The boys, DMan and Wild Boy, are required to wear school uniforms. Generally speaking, they wear about two outfits a day since I make them take the uniforms off as soon as they come home. I try to get them to wear the same home outfits a couple of days in a row, but that typically doesn't work well since the these clothes are what you would call . . . active wear. Basically, they're liable to look like coal miners by dinner.

My 15 year old, Tuba Girl, is a messy kid who, even after all these years, still doesn't understand the concept of putting clothes  away. I know she keeps sneaking clean clothes into the washing machine and that agitates the flying crap out of me. I swear one day I'm going to take the time to sit down and determine what it's costing me to keep rewashing her clean clothes and then start chasing her around for the money like a crazy collections officer.

"YOU OWE ME 7 CENTS FOR THOSE TWO PAIR OF CLEAN PANTS I JUST WASHED AND DRIED FOR YOU! AGAIN! IN THREE MORE YEARS, YOU'RE GOING TO OWE ME 5000 DOLLARS JUST IN WASTED WATER AND ELECTRICITY! NO COLLEGE FUND FOR YOU!"

Seriously, I have to figure out how to cut down on this rewashing business. Opinions taken, but don't bet on anything happening with it. I've told her she can just wash her own clothes, but she just keeps rewashing the clean ones. Perverse child.

At any point, we use a good bit of laundry detergent. Typically, I buy Purex or Xtra, depending on whichever is cheaper at that time. Sometimes, I fuck up and accidentally buy Sun because for a long time I kept forgetting what it was I bought. I just knew it was in a greenish bottle and cost me about five bucks.

I can't even begin to describe the smell of Sun. They should just write Ass across the bottle because it's like they managed to capture the essence of Swamp Ass, blended it with a touch  Dog Shit Breath and sold it as a cleaning agent. And I don't if people buy this shit on purpose or they're like me and keep picking up the wrong bottle by accident, but that is the funkiest detergent I've ever exposed myself to. I hate Sun and I'm so pissed off at myself when I realize I've just funked up my clothes. So I usually end up washing clothes with Ajax grapefruit dish detergent until I can go buy some more crap for my clothes. We smell fruity, but it's better than Shit Breath Swamp Ass.

Anyway, I know some online bitches that I happen to like and they're a good information resource a lot of the time. Someone linked to a laundry detergent recipe website and I decided I have enough time in my life to try this.  I picked out a recipe, headed off to Walhell to pick up my washing soda, ivory soap, and borax about midnight last week right after my daughter got through delivering a kick ass tuba performance at the football game. Her tuba section blew the rival tuba section out of the water. I didn't actually see that since I was volunteering in the concession stand, but any band my clothes wasting kid is on is going to kick any other band's ass.

I finally rounded up all my heathens and we headed home where I slept until 2PM the next afternoon because I wanted to and I could. I spend a lot of time running on a sleep deficit. (I'll talk about the Valerian Root another day.)

At any point, I dragged out of bed and began my laundry making process. I'd already melted the ivory soap and was in the process of measuring out my washing soda and borax when I realized I hadn't bought washing soda. I bought frigging baking soda. So now I was all in a quandary because I basically just spent 10 bucks to make endless laundry detergent and I didn't know if I was going to end up with some kind with birthday cake in my washing machine.

I turned to my trusty interweb services to figure out just how badly I'd screwed up. Apparently, the more caustic washing soda tends to be more effective for stubborn stains, but baking powder is just as good at neutralizing odors. Which I guess works well since I picked the damned huge baking soda box up in the laundry section. I have a bad habit of glossing over important details. Like reading big yellow boxes in the laundry aisle. Writing this, I've also decided I seem to shop by colors. Which sort of disturbs me.

SEE?

I tried it out anyway and my clothes seem to be fine. The boys' father came over to visit them on Sunday and I made him sniff a load of laundry to make sure it smelled decent. I try to give him small, easy tasks to complete. It seems to work for him.

The detergent seems to be working just fine. I used recipe number one in the link I posted and it made about 175 ounces of laundry detergent. I filled up two old laundry detergent bottles then had some left over in the pot I used to make it. I'm not too good at figuring up these costs things, especially since I threw out my freaking receipt before I wrote all this shit down, but here goes an estimate. (I like estimates. Concrete answers tend to be a bit off putting for me. That covers about my whole life.)

I typically spend five dollars a month on laundry detergent. (So out of that $995 left over after tampons, I had about $990 after laundry detergent.) Well, this weekend I spent approximately ten dollars on supplies to make my laundry detergent and then stored it in old laundry detergent bottles so storage hasn't cost me anything extra.

I'm thinking I can make a minimum of 525 ounces of laundry detergent with the supplies I currently have. That's a damned lot of detergent. So if  I use a quarter of a cup (which equals out to something like two fluid ounces) then I have enough stuff on hand to wash something like 262 loads of clothes. Considering that I wash at least one load a day, I shouldn't have to buy any more of this stuff until sometime around June or July. Deducting the 10 bucks I spent to buy the supplies, I think I have just saved $30 over an 8 month period. We'll see how long the stuff lasts.

Now, of course I could sit down and try to figure up the amount of electricity I just used in boiling the water but I have shit to do. Like  write about making laundry detergent and I find the cost of running my stove negligable considering that I like to run my air conditioner.

My clothes don't seem to really have any kind of smell and I guess I could get around to buying some essential oil to add to the detergent or something. But I guess since they don't stink and they look pretty clean, then I'm just going to go with that. I don't that paying extra for a smell I've come to associate with clean is something worth worrying over. The laundry detergent smell is just one of those things designed by THE MAN to make you buy shit you don't need.

Maybe next time I'll talk about my cleaning supply fetish. Which is kind of odd considering I hate cleaning house.