Our DIY Laundry Soap

We have been using this detergent for over a year now and are happy with how well it works. I have gotten grass stains, grease, and blood out with it, with no pre-treating. The only thing I wasn't able to get out was some salad dressing. For Baby spit I pre-treat with a tablespoon of this detergent dissolved in a quart of cold water. Soak for an hour and then wash as normal.

It also rinses very cleanly and we have not had any buildup on the diapers after roughly 60 washings. So we haven't had to strip the diapers. If we do, I will let you know how long it took.

My wife and I have sensitive skin and have not had any irritation. I would not call it hypo-allergenic by any means, just an anecdote that it works for us and may work for you.

Now then, how to make it:

My Equipment (with local prices):

Washing Soda ($1.50/box)
Borax ($3/box)
Fels-Naptha Soap ($1/bar)
Microplane Grater (~$12)

You will use 1 bar of soap, 2 1/4 cups of Washing Soda, and 1 ½ cups of Borax per batch.

Grate the Fels-Naptha soap on the smallest holes on your grater. I prefer a Microplane, but I started making this soap using a generic $4 box grater. Both work well, but the Microplane makes a quicker job of it.

Once you grate the soap, mix it and the other ingredients together in a container. I use a 1 gallon plastic jug that used to hold biscotti. Now it holds three batches of laundry soap with enough room to shake it and mix the ingredients.



I use 1 Tablespoon of detergent per size of the load (1Tbs for a small load, 2 for a medium, 3 for a large, 4 for an extra large). We have a top loading washer, so I don't know how it would do with a front load or HE washer directly. From folks I know who tried this recipe, it worked fine in an HE front loader as it doesn't foam up.

But, the last bit of good news, the cost. A box of Arm and Hammer Super Washing Soda is ~8 cups. The 20 Mule Team Borax is around ~10 cups. So, one batch yields approximately 108 Tablespoons of detergent, and I can get 36 large loads of detergent for about $1.90, or $.06 a load. Compare that to a 240 load pack of Tide powder at $53.70, or $0.23/wash. The savings add up quickly and the time requirements are low. I can make enough soap to last us several months in 30 minutes.

So, Your Baby is a Super-Soaker

We quickly found out that Baby was a Super-Soaker. Though she has had frequent wet diapers since birth they have been very wet diapers. We found that she would wet her diaper and almost immediately begin crying heavily, even from a deep sleep. This lead to us changing the diapers in very short order, often with her going on the changing table while trying to get a new on her.

Because we noticed that this was only happening with the cloth diapers since we got home, we had a place to start. We had a few disposables left from what the hospital gave us so put one on. No problem. It seemed that once she got wet, she became uncomfortable. We needed to keep her dryer.

Ok. So we knew that the disposables were locking the moisture away from her skin. We needed to find away to help that. As ssing cloth diapers is an important part of our budget planning we wanted to find a way to keep using them while Baby stays happy.

Here is what we found:

1. Use a fleece diaper liner. The fleece has a wicking action that pulls moisture away from the skin leaving baby dryer.

You can make this by getting some heavy weight fleece. Our local fabric shop sells an Arctic fleece that is quite heavy. Cut them to size so they are 3/4" smaller all the way around than your diaper. Whenever you change your baby put one of these down and put the diaper on as normal. This also helps the clean up from dirty diapers.

2. Use a doubler. This give more material to soak up the wetness so baby is not as wet.

3. Make sure you are getting a good fit with your diaper cover. We saw that if there was much of a gap around a leg that the evaporation from the wet diaper would leave Baby's skin cooler here adding to her dismay.

Once we started doing these Baby was no longer disgruntled at the first sign of wetness. She is more comfortable and we are happy to make her that way.

Do the other cloth diaper users out there have other suggestions that work for them?

My Least Favorite Diaper Cover: Cot N Wrap

I really really want to like this diaper cover. It fits great, seals around the legs perfectly, and I have never had a blow out in it, unlike some of our other covers. Alas, I can't love. I am filled with remorse that such a great design is rendered useless by the thing that makes it so soft and comfortable on Baby: the cotton.

This is a diaper cover that has cotton inside and out with a layer of waterproofing in between them. All the details, including the gussets and trim around the edges, are cotton. The problem with this is, at least with a super-soaking baby, once the cotton on the inside gets good and moist, it wicks it throughout the cotton on both sides. As a result, Baby is damp and now needs a change of diaper and a change of clothes. Nothing I have done (fleece liner, doubler, double fleece) has prevented the wetness from spreading.

Conglomeration

For anyone reading the blog at the moment, I apologize for posts that seeming show up at random in the past. I shut down some of my other ongoing projects that were specific to one topic and am bringing them all together in this one place. My mind is best experienced in it's madness, but, for it all to make sense, I need to put it all back together in chronological order and tied to the days of significance.

Green Mountain Diapers Does It Again

We placed our latest order from Green Mountain Diapers on Wednesday the 14th. We received them today. We decided to stay with fitted diapers and bought some Snug-To-Fit Supremes. They washed up nicely and dried much quicker than the GMD Infant Fitted Diaper. The STF took 90 minutes to dry compared to the 120-150 the GIF take. We still need some new covers but Baby still has another pound or two before we switch covers.

Thanks again to Earth Jo for recommending Karen and company. It has been a great experience every step of the way.

Peeing Isn't Easy

A friend of mine asked me how things were going with Baby now that she is a bit older and are things settling down. Though I am finally getting some solid sleep at night, she is now spending more time during the day awake, so I get less of the big projects done and have to focus on smaller ones that I can do with one hand or that I can do in 10-15 minutes while she cat naps.

For those of you who are going to be stay at home parents, take note. For those of you who have been doing this for a while, I hope you find the humor in our lives and the way things change.

From the email:

Even basic things like going the bathroom take twice as long because of
having to:secure Alyn, go the bathroom, make sure you are clean, go back and
pick her up, realize she needs changed, change her, wash your hands again to get
off the baby good, realize she is down to her last diaper, lay her back down,
throw in a load of diapers, oh, wait, that load I had in the wash this morning
is still there, put those in the dryer, NOW put the diapers in the wash, go
upstairs, pick up Alyn, walk her downstairs to get the diaper bag for her diaper
pail, lay her back down, put the bag in the pail, pick her back up.

Baby is 2 Months Old

And what an exciting first two months it has been. In her first 61 days of life she has:

• Been to a softball tournament.
• Enjoyed the Amusement Park 3 times with Wife, Sissy, and I.
• Travelled to Nanny and Pap's for a picnic.
• Helped me pick fresh fruits and veggies at the Farmer's Market.
• Watched Sissy compete in a horse show.
• Dropped Sissy off at two different Girlscout Camps. She was the star of the show and all the girls loved her, especially the Kiwi's.
• Taken long trips to the grocery store.

Having her out in public is something important to Wife and I. We did not want to uproot our schedule just because we had a newborn. Instead, we wanted to start acclimating Baby to our lives as soon as we could. So far we have had a lot of success with getting her out and about. Though we have had to cut a few trips short and rearrange our plans to make things work, it has been worthwhile. She handles trips into public well and has, so far, liked being around people. I hope that this will provide a solid root to her future socialization.