laundry soap uggggh

Yesterday and today I made becca's laundry soap recipe from here.  After months, I've finally saved up enough milk cartons (I bought the other things I needed months ago before realizing I had nowhere to store the soap after I made it.)

Well.

First step was to grate the bar of soap.  I admit, I hated this.  It was like grating a frozen crayon.  I have a bad history with grating my knuckles badly, so I was very careful and probably took a lot longer than I needed to.  But I did it.  It looks like cheese!

Second step was the melt down the soap.  She said to do it in 4 cups of water on the stove, and that it would take about ten minutes for the flakes to dissolve.  I stirred for twenty minutes watching to see if my lumps were getting any smaller.  Then I added another cup of water and they dissolved in relief.  Talk about a super saturated liquid.

Next step was to stir it with five gallons hot water.

 I have no idea why the picture has those weird lines on it; my computer's been trying to tell me this SD card is corrupt for a while, maybe it means it takes retarded pictures.

As instructed, I let it sit overnight.  Here's what it looked like this morning:

Lovely.  Joe really wants me to post this on Facebook and say that we collected our snot...I'm surprised he'd suggest something that juvenile because that sounds like something I would do.  This was like jello, seriously molded to the form of the bucket.

Here's where I ran into trouble.  It needed to be stirred again, but using the broom handle only stirred the jello around in circles - it didn't break up any chunks.  I submerged my arms and squeezed the chunks as well as I could, but it didn't help that much.  My first problem:  Chunks splash.  As I slowly poured the gunk into the funnel, it wasn't a steady stream of liquid.  It was more like diarrhea.  It splashed everywhere, and I had to be careful not to get it in my eyes.

Something else it did, was the chunks took longer to get down the funnel.  So the funnel kept overflowing.

Look closely on the floor to see all the soap that spilled.

The recipe makes 5 gallons of concentrate, to be mixed with an equal amount of water for the final product.  So my 5-gallon bucket was supposed to make 10 gallons soap.  It made 8.  I hate to think that much soap actually spilled on the floor, so I'll just go with the theory that I didn't fill the bucket up all the way.

Finally, I'm paranoid.  Because this recipe is supposedly low suds for high efficiency washers, but as I was filling up the bottles, some of them had no suds and some of them had more suds.  I think it's because the concentrate never got properly mixed so now I have some bottles that are going to work better than others.

Nevertheless, here they are.  I'll keep you updated.