Is this Reel for Real?

As I continue to find new ways to detox the house replacing store bought cleaners with homemade versions, I recently decided to try a liquid laundry soap. There are many recipes available with ingredients you might already have in the house although what I have discovered is the recipes are not always as they appear to be. Often, what I see demonstrated online works better in the reel than for real, so a little trial and error is still needed.

A dry power laundry soap works well, but after seeing a version online, I still needed to refine it for our use. Creating it takes a little time such as grating a bar of soap, which I do by hand. A food processor works, too, but you have to get it out, clean it, cut the soap down anyway, so I find grabbing a grater and grating is faster and easier.

The other day I found this nice lady online who lives on a farm, she said, with a bunch of kids playing in dirt all day. She swears by her homemade liquid laundry soap that seemed like a cinch to put together, so I tried her recipe:

1 cup borax

1 cup washing soda

5 cups of heated (not boiling) water

1 cup of liquid soap (I use Castile soap)   

I followed her instructions, blending the dry ingredients first, stirring in the water and then gently folding in the Castile soap. Perfect. It looked just like bottled laundry soap with the same consistency.

However, hours later, when I needed to do a load, I discovered my beautiful liquid soap had turned into a gelatinous solid. There was no pouring this stuff, just scooping it out. I figured the washer drawer would not be able to move this gooey stuff out, so I added it to the drum myself and thought it would dissolve in there.

No luck. When the load finished and I removed the wet clothes, I found the glops of my soap at the bottom of the drum¾not dissolved.  Did the clothes get clean? I thought. Some of the soap wasn’t there floating around in a puddle, so I figured it must have dissolved and worked. 

How did this not happen to the lady’s batch and, if so, why didn’t she tell us? At first, it seemed great, pourable and so was mine, but that consistency didn’t last. 

Back online, I learned, I could salvage the gooey soap by reheating or blending it to get it back to a liquid state. Ah, I thought this is probably what some of the chemicals in laundry soap do, keep it in a pourable form … but I am not going to confirm this because I am not going back to store bought laundry detergent. If anything, I’ll just use my dry powder, which works well along with white vinegar for softener.      

I can’t help but think, was this an AI reel or for real? Maybe I will never know, but it takes a human to figure this stuff out.