DIY Laundry Soap... Take II

Last week I was talking to my aunt about this laundry detergent and she asked if I added any fragrance to it. I hadn't because it smelled pretty nice on its own and I figured adding fragrance oil would make it clump up. Joshua had the brilliant idea of adding the oil to some salt (like we do for our 5th and Glen Co.  bath salts) and mixing that into the detergent. So I pulled out my stuff and decided to give it a whirl... AND I remembered to take pictures this time :)

So here's all the ingredients from the original post

And here's the fun part... blowing up the soap in the microwave. This time I cut the soap into eight pieces instead of quarters

I put each half of the bar of soap in the microwave for 1-1/2 minutes (instead of the whole bar for 3 minutes). Here's what happens...

While my soap blob was cooling I mixed up my fragrance. I used about 8ml of fragrance oil (one of our favorites, the gender neutral fresh bamboo) with 1/2 cup of regular old epsom salt. Since I wasn't sure how it would turn out, I didn't want to waste too much of either of those ingredients because we use them for our business. I should also mention, if you go this route, be careful! Depending on the fragrance oil, it may discolor your salt and if it discolors your salt, I wouldn't risk washing clothes with it.  Here's my salt...

I had a very special helper mixing up my salt with all the other ingredients (except for the soap!)
1 cup Borax
1 cup Washing Soda
1 cup Oxy Clean

My soap was all cooled off so I dumped it into a separate bowl and Ben and I got to smashing it up with forks

Unfortunately, my tiny, while enthusiastic about helping had a really hard time keeping the soap in the bowl so I decided to try using the blender to grind it up. One thing I will say is you can't put all the soap in at once. This is what I initially put into the blender...

It was WAY too much. I ended up splitting it into thirds and it worked much better.

Then we mixed it all together.

Last time I used mason jars to store my soap. It ended up using a ton of jars so I decided to use a leftover container I held on to from our camping trip.

I soaked the label off and with some scrap paper and mod podge my laundry soap has a new home

Even though I liked the way it smelled on its own, I much prefer the bamboo scented version. I think we'll stick with it for a while.